Formerly called Twitter, X seems to have gotten rid of years’ worth of picture posted on the site before 2014, and links shared using the company’s built-in URL shortener around the time also aren’t working.
The problem was revealed in a post by Tom Coates, who alerted that a famous selfie that was posted by Ellen DeGeneres at the 2014 Oscars could no longer be viewed on the platform.
Coates said: “More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. That’s — so far — almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.”
Even though Ellen DeGeneres’ selfie has been restored, the shortened Twitter links for other images remain broken, meaning they aren’t visible on the platform.
You are able to confirm this by searching for posts from X-owner Elon Musk by searching “From:elonmusk until:2014-01-01” on the platform’s search bar.
A few of the images that Musk posted before 2014 do appear in the search results, with most posts showing a brief description and an unclickable shortened link.
Coates added in a series of posts by saying: “Even if the images start to come back, that doesn’t mean it was ‘just a bug’. It’s just as plausible that they’d test something out and rapidly choose to backtrack when they saw the response.”
