Update: Affected posts have now been restored. See end of post for explanation.
Facebook has seemingly removed all tweets that users had published to their Facebook profile through cross-posting from Twitter. As first noticed by TechCrunch, Facebook’s removal of the shared tweets comes following the deprecation of an API that blocked the cross-posting feature from working.
Over the years, many Facebook users linked their Facebook and Twitter accounts and used cross-posting to automatically post anything they tweeted as status updates on Facebook. In the past week, however, users noticed that all of those status posts had disappeared from Facebook.
In addition to the statuses being removed, all comments, likes, and other reactions have disappeared as well – essentially erasing years of what could have been valuable memories and conversations.
Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates.
According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it.
It’s unclear at this point if this move on Facebook’s part was intentional or an error. The company told TechCrunch that it is “aware of the issue” and investigating it, but the status of that investigation is unclear.
Earlier this month, Facebook made an API change that prevented Twitter users from automatically publishing their tweets to Facebook. This change, which prohibits any third-party applications from publishing posts to a user’s account, came as part of Facebook’s wider efforts to lockdown its platform following data misuse scandals. At the time, there was no indication this change would affect old statuses.
Were you a user of cross posting functionality between Twitter and Facebook? Have you noticed that your old posts are gone? Let us know down in the comments!
Update: From Axios:
Here’s what happened, according to a source close to Twitter.: Twitter had initially asked Facebook for more time to see if there was a way for users to continue joint posting to both social networks, but Facebook said no.
As a result, the Twitter app for the Facebook platform was essentially made useless earlier this month once Facebook officially removed the ability to cross-post. With the app’s sole function eliminated, Twitter decided to delete it from the Facebook platform, having no reason to think that doing so would remove old tweets that were cross-posted. It’s not clear whether Facebook knew this would happen, either.
That said, the content has apparently now been restored.
“A Twitter admin requested their app be deleted, which resulted in content that people had cross-posted from Twitter to Facebook also being temporarily removed from people’s profiles,” Facebook said. “However, we have since restored the past content and it’s now live on people’s profiles.”
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