Earlier this year, on May 8th, I deleted all of my tweets, just under 5,000 of them. I know exactly today because I am tweet about it.
But this morning I found out that Twitter has recovered quite a few of my old retweets; Interactions i Known I have been deleted from my profile. Those retweets are gone. I remember scanning my restless schedule before thinking, “Wow, time to get some attention on myself.” But now they are back. You can see them by scrolling down on my timeline after May 8th, with more to appear if you select “Tweets with replies. ”
I remember deleting all of my tweets because I tweeted about it
The retweets themselves are exactly the same. there video Of the children cheering construction worker. a soprano meme About Lindy (Do you remember Lindy?). But the oldest It dates back to 2020 – A video from the George Floyd protests I was going to share while they were happening. Why on earth would Twitter retrieve three years old information? And what do you say about the ability of platform users to control their data? Nothing good, obviously.
You’re not the only one who’s noticed that recently deleted tweets are showing up. I only checked my timeline after seeing a post on Mastodon (via Ryan Broderick’s newsletter) where a user complained on May 17 that 34,000 of his deleted tweets had been recovered.
This past November, I deleted all of my tweets. each one individually. Then I turned on Redact and deleted all my likes, media, and tweets,” open source developer Dick Morrell said. “Woke up today to find 34,000 of them restored [sic] Twitter that supposedly backed up a cluster of servers. Now re-delete. This explains why you should not use Twitter at all.”
It is not clear how common or what causes this problem. This could be due to the tool used to delete tweets (although I used TweetDelete.net while Morrell said he used Redact), while some have speculated that it was because the Twitter servers accidentally moved and restored the data. ZDNET Morell reports that more than 400 people told him they had similar problems, while doing a quick survey of my colleagues at the edge Those who mass-deleted tweets got mixed results. Some said their old tweets were still missing while others said some seemed to be back.
There has been a spike in Twitter bugs since Musk’s acquisition
Whatever is going on, it is further evidence of Twitter’s dilapidated infrastructure and its inability to deliver on even the basic functions it promises users. Some of these failures predate Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. (See, for example, the problem with many years of DMs not being properly deleted.) But there has been a spike in bugs since Musk started mass shootings, with users reporting similar glitches as private tweets made public.
For me, the issue is trivial. It’s just an old retweet. But it points to a bigger problem. Twitter is It remains an important tool for activists, whistleblowers, and protesters around the world. There is a reason why Türkiye forced the company to block some tweets during its ongoing elections. Twitter still matters. But if you are, say, a political dissident in an authoritarian country, being able to delete your own tweets could be crucial to your freedom. For all of Musk’s talk about free speech, the company doesn’t seem to care about it.
While writing this story, I emailed the press line on Twitter to see if anyone would comment, just for the look. I received the automated response the company now sends to every inquiry, no matter how polite or needy: “💩.” I deleted it.
