- X is apparently removing images and links from older tweets (posts).
- There’s no clear reason behind the removal but it seems to be affecting posts that were shared before 2014.
- Even the famous Oscar selfie shared by Ellen DeGeneres has the image missing from the tweet.
X (formerly Twitter) been going through the biggest rebranding, and with it some major changes. Not everyone has been happy with the changes other than the recent payout to users with tweets that have more than 5 million impressions. The latest change on X is actually affecting photos that were shared before 2014 as they’re no longer showing up on the platform.
X removes photos, links before 2014
According to a report by The Verge, any images or links that were shared using Twitter’s built-in URL shortener have disappeared from the platform. This issue was pointed out by X user Tom Coates who also shared the search results for his posts from before 2014 that has missing images and links. So either the image doesn’t show at all or the hyperlink is removed so the link is inaccessible.
The tweets still exist but the content with the image or link isn’t visible. For example, as Coates pointed out, the famous Oscar selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres, is no longer visible. This selfie with actors including Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep was once the most retweeted tweet with 2.8 million reposts, and 2 million likes. If you open the tweet, you’ll see that the image isn’t visible anymore.
But if we look at another famous tweet, one by Barack Obama that was shared in 2012, this one still has the image so this one might have been restored.
It’s not clear yet why this is happening as neither X nor Elon Musk have given any explanation. According to The Verge, this seems to affect posts before 2014 because of some changes that Twitter had made in 2016. This particular change is the addition of expanded URL enrichment in 2012 that “automatically expands shortened URLs that are included in the body of a Tweet, and includes the resulting URL as metadata within the payload.”
Twitter later introduced enhanced URL enrichment that provided the website’s HTML title and description in the tweet payload. Changes to tweets with this settings came into effect from December 2014, so posts prior to this seem to be affected by the latest glitch.
