Following Facebook’s move to restrict cross-posts from other platforms earlier this month via changes to its API platform, many users noticed their old Twitter posts disappearing from Facebook this week. The cross-posting option lets users publish their Twitter posts to Facebook automatically. The absence of cross posting was first noticed by users who heavily relied on cross-posting to keep their Facebook active. Without that feature, the Twitter app for Facebook was not of much use. This had caused a lot of old posts to disappear, first noticed around August 26, leaving users furious. Some of the users’ profiles were left fairly empty since they relied on cross-posting to keep their accounts active.
Facebook API platform changes are a part of Facebook’s plan to take strict measures on misuse of its platform after the Cambridge Analytica scandal at the start of this year. Since then, Facebook has been taking a variety of efforts to prevent data misuse; stopping third-parties from being able to post to Facebook is one of them.
TechCrunch was the first to report on the issue is sudden disappearance of cross-posts from Twitter, and Facebook confirmed to them the same day that it is checking the issue. Common belief is that changes in the API to prevent cross-posting would not have mass-deleted all the older posts. Following these changes from Facebook, Twitter asked Facebook for its app to be deleted from their platform. The result was users’ old Twitter posts on Facebook getting deleted.
Turns out that this was just a bug and now it is fixed. In a statement to Axios, Facebook cleared the confusion saying “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. However, we have since restored the past content and it’s now live on people’s profiles.”
You can find the original report on TechCrunch.
