About

Tweet Unavailable is a notification message on Twitter indicating that a particular tweet cannot be displayed.

Origin

On January 26th, 2012, Twitter introduced the "Tweet Withheld" notification in a blog^[9] post saying, "If people are located in a country where a Tweet or account has been withheld and they try to view it, they will see a alert box that says 'Tweet withheld' or '@Username withheld' in place of the affected Tweet or account" (shown below). The New York Times^[5] commented on the outrage surrounding Twitter announcing that they "would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal."

Spread

On December 22nd, 2016, the blog howtodotechystuff^[1] published an article explaining the reasons people began seeing the "Tweet Unavailable" notification. The blog post provided reasoning like, "the tweet has been deleted, you have blocked the sender [or] the original sender of the tweet has blocked you." On November 6th, 2017, Redditor u/wolverine5454 posted a screenshot of an unavailable tweet to r/mildlyinfuriating^[7] (shown below).

On February 15th, 2017, BuzzFeed ^[4] reported that Twitter had been throttling^[3] user accounts in a shadow ban-like tactic. They wrote:

"Twitter is temporarily decreasing the reach of tweets from users it believes are engaging in abusive behavior via a new protocol that began rolling out last week.

The protocol temporarily prevents tweets from users Twitter deems abusive from being displayed to people who don't follow them, effectively reducing their reach. If the punished user mentions someone who doesn't follow them, for instance, that person would not see the tweet in their notifications tab. And if the punished user's followers retweet them, those retweets wouldn't be shown to people who don't follow them."

Over time, tweets became unavailable for numerous reasons including: the Twitter user has deleted that particular tweet, the Twitter user has blocked you from seeing their tweet, you have blocked that particular Twitter user, quoting their own tweet, private accounts, the tweet tags a blocked account, or the tweet has been flagged for sensitive content.^[2][6] There was a general increase in these notifications in June of 2019 leading Redditors like u/ramon1098 to post images in response to increase. On June 7th, 2019 u/ramon1098 posted an image to r/pewdiepiesubmisions^[8] (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References