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submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014::Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.

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[-] KirbySSM@lemmy.world 436 points 1 year ago

Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Verge is fed up lol

[-] derf82@lemmy.world 99 points 1 year ago

I figure they would at least mention the poop emoji auto reply.

[-] SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 22 points 1 year ago
[-] mindbleach@lemmy.world 68 points 1 year ago

Charitable assumption.

It probably broke.

[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

No, they changed it to, "We'll get back to you soon." sometime after the new CEO came on board. Of course they never "get back to you soon". So, it might as well be a poop emoji.

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[-] const_void@lemmy.ml 185 points 1 year ago
[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 161 points 1 year ago

Time to cut some storage costs!

[-] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 90 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is exactly it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if certain accounts had images from then that might get request by law enforcement that are now “oops all gone!”

[-] TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

Someone noticed it knocked out most of the Arab Spring. Remember who also owns part of Twitter?

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[-] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That, or he wasn't even paying the bill and everything finally got wiped.

[-] GreenMario@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago

More like can't cancel me for something I said in 2012 if there's no record of it.

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[-] hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz 113 points 1 year ago

Is anyone still on twitter? Why?

[-] FLX@lemmy.world 86 points 1 year ago

Because of this fucking online press embedding tweets into every article, even weather reports

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 60 points 1 year ago

Momentum. It's still the most popular platform for many niches and it will stay popular as long as it's popular....

[-] redwall_hp@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

And English speakers are only a fraction of the user base. Current events in the US social media bubble barely penetrate the general public in the US, let alone across international and language barriers.

It's probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.

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[-] iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world 94 points 1 year ago

Not a glitch. Costs less to dump the data than maintain it, plus a lot of cringey Musk tweets were in there.

[-] cesium@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 year ago

The images are still available through direct links. The t.co redirects are broken.

[-] protput@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Lol. That's is? I hate this sensational bs.

[-] olympicyes@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Tweets were 140 characters including urls to photos. It means the photo or url linked no longer works because users would shorten links instead of the full image url.

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[-] Fish@midwest.social 11 points 1 year ago

If Musk was worried about cringey tweets then he would just delete his account.

[-] Echo71Niner@lemm.ee 94 points 1 year ago

Haha, "glitch" about $10 million dollars in storage fee was cleared.

[-] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 88 points 1 year ago

Anyone still using Twitter is a top tier masochist. It was always a pretty shit platform, but it's being made fun of by the toilet and the dumpster now for how shitty it is.

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Hell, I think the sewage treatment plant is starting to blush at this point.

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[-] bappity@lemmy.world 53 points 1 year ago

put someone in the server room with an axe and they could do less damage than Elon

[-] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago

3-2-1 Rule:
3 copies of the data.
2 Different media types.
1 of those off-site.

If you're relying on Twitter as the only place you have an image you care about, you're making a bad choice.

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 47 points 1 year ago

I don't think that's the point.

[-] brsrklf@compuverse.uk 27 points 1 year ago

I don't think anybody seriously used twitter as storage.

Rather the point is that, similarly to every time a blogging platform or another online service with user content shuts down, a bit of internet history disappears with it. Links are broken, traces of opinions or bits of knowledge from another time are not available anymore...

It's not the end of the world, and at that point I wouldn't really care if twitter disappeared completely overnight, but still, some stuff will be lost.

[-] Intralexical@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Donate to the Internet Archive, y'all.

[-] deong@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.

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[-] dezmd@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago
[-] skymtf@pricefield.org 35 points 1 year ago

I am kinda without words, need to check if one of my favorite post are still up. The poet was made by a trans women before she knew she was trans. She was sitting in a boat and said I feel like a girl in a 90s movie. She quote posted it recently and said we made it girlie.

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[-] HellAwaits@lemm.ee 34 points 1 year ago

Sure, a "glitch". More like further last ditch efforts to keep Twitter alive by cutting any costs necessary.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 23 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier.

As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014, judging by posts visible on my own account.

On Saturday afternoon, as Coates pointed out, the glitch claimed the picture from one of the most famous tweets ever (back when they were still called tweets), this selfie posted by 2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres flanked by celebs like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and others, taken during the show’s broadcast.

I haven’t seen any public comments from owner Elon Musk or X CEO Linda Yaccarino about the problem, but at some point on Saturday night / early Sunday morning, the picture in that post was restored.

Despite speculation that it could be an intentional cost-cutting move by Musk, the fact that the actual media posted hasn’t been deleted suggests an error or bug of some kind, one of many that have arisen since last year’s takeover and mass layoffs.

There’s also at least one other old tweeted image that still worked — the one posted to President Barack Obama’s account after winning his 2012 campaign for reelection, showing a hug between him and the First Lady.


The original article contains 394 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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[-] sdoorex@slrpnk.net 23 points 1 year ago
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[-] HeyJoe@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Trying to decide if I care enough to check my account that I started in like 2009 and haven't looked at since probably 2012. After everything that has happened I almost feel like it would be impressive if it still existed.

[-] lud@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago

That's very privacy friendly of them ;)

[-] VicentAdultman@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

At this point, I guess he is the most Mastodon support of all time, damn. He is really trying hard to make people quit his platform

[-] sturmblast@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

This is comical

[-] Taringano@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

It's just that viewing tweets/xeets? Of the past are a premium feature. You can only see posts from the current second. It's to keep you really updated.

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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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