INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates
The posts& removal took place following the recent API change that preventedTwitter users from continuing to automatically publish their
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 aware of the issue and is looking into it.
TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader, Lawrence
Miller, who couldn''t find any information about the issue in Facebook Help Center
We&ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook.
Given the real-time nature of social
media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize their
old posts have been removed.
In fact, we only found a handful of public complaints about the deletions, so far.
For example:
@facebook I
used the Twitter for Facebook app for years, and I realize it's not working and isn't going to
But I just discovered all the Facebook updates it put have been deleted and dissappeared from my timeline! Is there a way to retrieve
this
mdash; Omer Lev (@omerlev) August 26, 2018
A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically
post Tweets to our Facebook profile or page and all of our previous Twitter posts were deleted by Facebook
#dfwwx #txwx #plano https://t.co/sAOsbdBjVO
mdash; Plano, Texas Weather (@PlanoWX) August 24, 2018
My post on Facebook via Twitter was
deleted.WhyCan someone explain it #twitter
mdash; Tarin (@lestarindah499) August 26, 2018
Above: selected complaints from Twitter about the
data loss
Above: a comment on TechCrunch following our post on the API changes
Some of those who were impacted were very light Facebook
users and had heavily relied on the cross-posting to keep their Facebook accounts active
As a result of the mass removals, their Facebook profiles are now fairly empty.
TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino is one of those here who
He points out that the ability to share tweets to Facebook was a useful way to reach people who weren''t on Twitter in order to continue a
discussion with a different audience.
I&ve had tweet cross-posting turned on for years, from the early days of it even existing
This just removed thousands of posts from my Facebook silently, with no warning,& Matthew told me
&Even though the posts didn''t originate on Facebook, I often had ongoing conversations about the posts once my Facebook friends (and
Many of them would never see them on Twitter either because they don''t follow me or they don''t use it,& he said.
It wild to have all of
that context just vanish,& he added.
As you may recall, Facebook earlier this month made a change to its API platform to prevent third-party
apps from publishing posts to Facebook as the logged-in user
The change was a part of Facebook larger overhaul and lockdown of its API platform in the wake of theCambridge Analytica scandal,where as
manyas 87 million Facebook usershad their data improperly harvested and shared.
Since then, Facebook has been trying to plug up the holes in
its platform to prevent further data misuse
One of the changes it made was to stop third-parties from being able to post to Facebook as the logged-in user.
For existing apps, like
Twitter, that permission was revoked on August 1, 2018.
Above: Twitter cross-posting feature, on the day it was disabled by the Facebook
API change
Before the API changes, Twitter users were able to visit the &Apps& section from Twitter on the web, then authenticate with
Facebook to have their tweets cross-posted to Facebook social network
Once enabled, the tweets would appear on the user page as a Facebook post they had published, and their friends could then like and comment
on the post as any other.
In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from continuing to cross-post their tweets to
It shouldn''t have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users& profiles and business users& Facebook Pages.
This is a breach of
trust from a company that in the process of trying to repair a broken trust with its users across a number of fronts, including data misuse
Regardless of whatever new policy is in effect around apps and how they can post to Facebook, no one would have ever expected that Facebook
would actually remove their old posts without warning.
We&re hoping that the problem is a bug that Facebook can resolve, and not something
that will result in permanent data loss.
Facebook tells us while it doesn''t have further information about the problem at this time, it
should have more to share tonight or tomorrow about what being done.
