Twitter Keeps Breaking In Dangerous Ways: Deleted Tweets Reappearing

A whole bunch of media articles are noting that Twitter users who deleted tweets have noticed in recent weeks that the deleted tweets have magically returned. There seems to be little rhyme or reason for which deleted tweets have returned, but it’s definitely happening to many users. In some cases, people said they had deleted tens of thousands of tweets, only to find them all come back.

Twitter has said nothing, and people are generally guessing what happened. A former Twitter employee says that maybe some servers were moved between data centers, and that they “didn’t properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network, leading to stale data becoming revived.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when you kick nearly all of the institutional knowledge that held your newly owned website together out the door.

Anyway, for most people this isn’t that big of a deal, but there is real potential for harm. There are many reasons why people might delete old tweets, and some of them may be to protect themselves. There could be legal reasons to delete a tweet. Or reasons to protect against harassment.

Having such tweets come back to life (without notification) creates a real risk that actual harm could occur. This is the kind of thing that a good engineering team, working with a good trust & safety team would, you know, strive to prevent, in order to keep the users of a platform safe.

But, it’s been made abundantly clear that this is not something that Elon Musk cares about. Putting people in danger is fine, just so long as he continues to be the center of attention.