X appears to have deleted all images posted directly on the website between 2011 and 2014; links that used Twitter's native shortening service are also broken
Twitter, the social media platform officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014.
ForbesMatt Novak
Context & Ripple Effects
The incident surfaced during X’s transition away from Twitter branding, shortly after the platform introduced its interim X identity. A subsequent company statement said the failure was a bug and that no images or data were lost, making the episode primarily a test of the platform’s reliability rather than confirmed deletion.
It also exposed how much historical material depends on platform-controlled media storage and short links. That dependency became more salient as X later moved core systems to x.com, with uneven redirects for some legacy Twitter URLs still observed.
First-order effects
Users, publishers and researchers relying on affected posts temporarily lose access to embedded images and to destinations behind native shortened links.
X must restore service and reassure users that older archives remain intact; the bug report directly undermines confidence in legacy post retrieval.
Second-order effects
Articles, social embeds and third-party archives that point to affected posts can become incomplete or misleading until assets and redirects recover.
Organizations with historical material hosted only on X have a stronger incentive to retain original files and maintain independent links rather than treating a social post as the canonical archive.
Third-order effects
If branding, domain, and infrastructure transitions repeatedly disrupt older posts, social platforms increasingly function as unstable layers for the public web’s historical record.
The episode reinforces a broader preservation divide: platforms can control access to years of public material, while publishers and archives bear the cost of maintaining durable references.
The trend: Platform rebrands and infrastructure migrations are turning legacy social content and links into a digital-preservation risk rather than a permanent record.
Lots of images are now gone from Twitter. — For those of us who used Twitter to bookmark things, & don't have a backup... images & videos, they are now gone pre 2014. — Check for yourself. I've lost family photos. — https://twitter.com/...
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://twitter.com/search
That means the media from “Arab Spring”—during which Twitter played an important role for raising awareness about human rights violations and popular uprisings throughout the Middle East—is all gone now. He's literally erased history.
I sincerely hope Tweeted photos and videos from such as the “Occupy” Admiralty, Mongkok, Causeway Bay and (the very short-lived) Tsim Sha Tsui locales of the 2014 Umbrella Movement will be saved/get archived!🙏🙏🙏
If ruining the product worked in some gross way — more ads! big profits! huge crowds! — it would be easier to understand. Maybe the pivot to vandalism and brand destruction has a logic, but it's not clear to me what that logic is.
He's not just letting the site fall into disrepair, he's actively setting the Library of Alexandria on fire. Every experience you had on this site 2013 or earlier, it's gone. Hope you downloaded your archive data.
@firasd Anyone want to ask @jack about how delighted he is by Elon's actions and how they all make total sense again? One of these days, something will surely puncture his fantasy world again and bring him back to reality.
I can't even be snarky about this. This is just tremendously sad and only the beginning of what Twitter's slow cringe death means for the greater internet.
It's much worse than that. They nuked all the t dot co links. Every single thing linked out to before April 2014 — be it an image, video, Vine, or linking to any other site — is now a dead link.
Ive posted art in this website since 2011, and while I'm no longer super excited about my old art, it's still a piece of my journey shared here, that Elonshit just decided to erase. Fuck you Elon.
This is a good reminder that we should all download our Twitter data, especially because I think it's very, very likely that our old DM history is just gonna vanish out of nowhere one day like what happened to Reddit earlier this year.
I was notified about this @firasd - you can do a search of your own tweets by using the structure “from:{your user name} until:2014-01-01” in Twitter search.
By the way - in 2014 Ellen Degeneres posted a selfie from the Oscars and it became the most retweeted photo of all time. That photo is now gone from Twitter. https://twitter.com/...
@firasd This is what Twitter pre-2014 looks like - every image and video removed and replaced with a dead link. Epic vandalism by Musk. Another cost-saving exercise presumably - and one which 100% should make you trust his statements Twitter is just about to make money. [image]
It's unclear if this is a bug or intentional at the moment. But it has caused the photo from one of the most popular tweets ever, the Ellen DeGeneres Oscars selfie, to disappear. (h/t @mat) https://twitter.com/... [image]
(BTW - I've been working in and around social media for 20 years, most recently built a decentralized social network client funded by Bloomberg Beta. I'm currently looking for ways to push forward a more ethical and sustainable social media environment. If you need help, DM me.)
@firasd @jack It's POSSIBLE that Twitter hasn't intentionally done this for cost-cutting, but just f***ed stuff up when doing their punitive link delays on the NYT and stuff last week. It's possible the redirect that sent http to https was broken in the process.