Every so often, I’ll be scrolling through X (formerly Twitter), minding my business, when I bump into a post that feels oddly familiar. Not in the “déjà vu” kind of way, but in the “hold up, I’m sure I already liked or reposted this exact thing before” kind of way. And yet… there’s no trace of my like or repost. So, like a responsible citizen of the timeline, I do it again.
For the longest time, I thought I was hallucinating. Maybe my memory was playing tricks on me. Maybe I just imagined hitting that heart or those two arrows. But then, the internet reassured me: turns out, I’m not crazy. This is actually a thing.
Plenty of X users have been complaining about the same experience that stretches back over a year. People keep coming across viral posts they swear they’ve already engaged with, only to realize that their previous like or repost has mysteriously vanished. Some even joke that they’ve “liked and reposted the same tweet a hundred times.”
And it’s not just me being unlucky. The issue pops up often enough that you’ll find threads of users all expressing the same frustration: likes and reposts that undo themselves. In some cases, this even tilts the numbers on posts—like when a tweet racks up way more reposts than likes, leaving people scratching their heads.
So far, no one seems to know what’s going on for sure. It could be a long-standing glitch in X’s system, some quirk of the platform’s constant updates, or something more deliberate (you know, the kind of “censorship” theories that tend to sprout on social media).
What’s clear is that the problem isn’t isolated, and it isn’t exactly new. I’ve traced reports of this all the way back to last year on platforms like Reddit, with more recent complaints surfacing almost every other day on X itself. The pattern? A post goes viral, people like and repost it, and weeks later when it resurfaces in their feeds, their previous interaction has been wiped away.
Annoying or useful?
Depending on how you look at it, this bug—or feature—has two sides. On the annoying end, it makes you feel like your interactions don’t matter, as if your digital footprint is being erased without your consent. On the oddly useful end, it does give some posts a second (or third, or fourth) wave of amplification. Every time someone re-likes or re-shares, that piece of content gets pushed further out into the feeds and new audience.
Still, most users (myself included) would probably prefer the choice of whether to re-engage, instead of the platform quietly undoing it for us.
For a platform that thrives on visibility and engagement, it’s a bit ironic that X can’t seem to keep track of the very actions that fuel it. Whether it’s a bug, an intentional tweak, or just another one of those “Elon things,” the disappearing likes and reposts mystery continues to baffle users.
Until X acknowledges or fixes it, I guess I’ll keep double-tapping and double-reposting my favorite tweets… and maybe you will too. After all, if a post is good enough, it probably deserves a second (or tenth) boost.
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