ExTwitter Broke Yet Again, Disappearing Nearly All Images From 2011 Through 2014

A few days Elon Musk tweeted that X as humanity's collective consciousness" and then pinned that meaningless platitude that would only sound profound to a stoned high schooler.

Anyway, if you're going to be humanity's collective consciousness" you should maybe try to to avoid making years worth of images inaccessible. But that's what Musk did a day after tweeting that.

It was first noticed by Tom Coates who claimed that Musk had removed" all media posted before 2014.

And, indeed, if you look at most (but not all) such old tweets, the images associated with them don't show up at all. However, it does not appear that the images have been deleted, but that exTwitter screwed up it's t.co link shortener (again, since it broke in March as well), which is used in association with media postings. And whatever broke made all of those old t.co links stop working, which has the impact of making all those tweets no longer show the images.

The Verge is reporting that some images have been restored, including the famous (infamous?) Oscars selfie that Ellen Degeneris and Bradley Cooper took at the 2014 Oscars which, for some period of time, was the most retweeted tweet on the platform. However, when I look at that tweet at time of writing, I still see it displayed as broken:

Anyway, I'm guessing that this is yet another bug on a platform that is now regularly full of bugs. It will hopefully get fixed soon if it's not by the time this post goes live. And, yes, things break all the time, but the frequency with which major and important things break on exTwitter is quite phenomenal and again should raise questions about why anyone trusts the platform for, well, anything, let alone having anything to do with humanity's collective consciousness."