Since Elon Musk’s takeover, more and more interesting things have been happening around Twitter (or X, knowing Musk…).

The new owner of one of the leading microblogging platforms (who will soon step down as CEO to become the CTO) might not have expected deleted tweets to suddenly pop up on the site. After all, if it was DELETED, it shouldn’t become visible again! But yet more and more Twitter users are reporting that the bug has made their deleted tweets readable again.

According to The Verge, several of the tweets that the author of the article, James Vincent, deleted a few weeks ago have become readable, and even tweets that have been missing from the platform since 2020 are now viewable again. For this reason, the platform is in a strange state, and since Vincent is not the only one to report this (we are talking about thousands of users), we have to say that the problem is systemic. Dick Morrell, on Twitter rival Mastodon said that after he deleted 38,000 tweets, 34,000 of them have resurfaced. So nearly 90% of the tweets in question have reappeared on the platform, making it a non-negligible bug. It should not happen!

Vincent has already contacted Twitter to learn more about the situation, but the site has not acknowledged the error. The latest tweet on their customer support account surfaced a day ago, and it doesn’t talk about the bug either but mentions the search in lists feature. The bug may have happened because they are working with external, third-party clients to delete tweets, but it might also occur due to Twitter’s servers.

Let’s talk about why it is a strange case. If something is deleted, it should disappear, right? But if short messages removed three years earlier still surfaced, why have they been kept for so long? Shouldn’t they have to disappear from everywhere within a certain period? Twitter is raising privacy issues!

Source: WCCFTech