X starts deleting Tweets including photos and links shared before 2014

Twitter seems to have removed a bunch of pictures uploaded on the platform between 2011 and 2014. This was noticed by a user named Tom Coates last Saturday. Not only did the images vanish, but links made using Twitter’s link shortening service during the same time don’t work anymore.

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.

For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://t.co/FU6K34oqmA

— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023

Tom Coates updated his tweet to explain that pictures are gone and links are broken, but the data still exists on Twitter’s servers.

Famous images like Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie, which got over 2.8 million retweets and is the most retweeted post ever, were affected. Luckily, this image was restored on Saturday, along with a tweet of Barack Obama hugging the First Lady after his re-election in 2012.

It seems that photos and links added from 2016 onward are working fine. This suggests there might be a cutoff related to this issue. This also lines up with when Twitter added “enhanced URL enrichment” for link previews and “native attachments” that let you add photos without using up the 140-character limit.