Users were shocked by X, formerly known as Twitter, when it made a decision. In fact, some of the first tweets were simply removed from the website.
Most likely, X simply cleared his platform. Over the weekend, old postings with photos or hyperlinks—particularly those that Twitter's built-in URL shortener converted—were removed. Tom Coates and Brazilian vlogger @DaniloTakagi raised attention to the problem by bringing up issues over the preservation of digital assets.
The decision appears to affect nearly all tweets containing media from before December 2014. It appears that only images and links are affected, while videos remain untouched. Links to external websites, including popular platforms like YouTube, are now shortened to non-working t.co URLs.
X CLEAN UP ITS PLATFORM AND DELETE NUMEROUS TWEETS
One moving illustration is Ellen DeGeneres' famous selfie from the 2014 Oscars, which included stars including Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. With an astounding 2 million shares, the message was the "most retweeted of all time" and received a ton of attention. Fortunately, the image was preserved on X's servers even though the issue caused it to briefly disappear.
Although Elon Musk initially believed this to be a novel money-saving strategy, the fact that the underlying media material is still present implies this was probably an accident rather than a conscious choice.