Oh, Twitter. What a trash fire. There’s now a Twitter bug that’s restoring deleted tweets and retweets.
On May 8th, The Verge‘s senior reporter James Vincent deleted around 5,000 of his tweets. Today, he discovered that the social media platform reinstated a bunch of those tweets and retweets. In fact, Twitter restored an old video Vincent had posted about the George Floyd protests, which is three-years-old at this point. Several other users also reported seeing the issue. What the actual heck, Twitter?
Twitter has yet to offer up an explanation or (even better) a solution. It’s also not immediately clear how many users are impacted by this bug. A former Twitter employee believes the bug occurred when Twitter was moving its servers around, thus accidentally restoring the old data. It’s a pain in the neck, that’s for sure.
This bug shines a harsh, blinding light on personal data and the control we may or may not have over it. Personally, I don’t care much for social media, so my posts are pretty vanilla as far as spiciness goes. That said, I like having control over what I post. This bug is honestly making me reconsider having a semi-active Twitter account. If Twitter can whip up some kind of miracle elixir to fix this bug (sooner rather than later would be preferred), then maybe I’ll stick around.
Author: Ashley Biancuzzo, Associate Editor
Ashley is a professional writer and editor with a strong background in tech and pop culture. She has written for high traffic websites such as Polygon, Kotaku, StarWars.com, and Nerdist. In her off time, she enjoys playing video games, reading science fiction novels, and hanging out with her rescue greyhound.