Twitter un-retweeting older retweets - rules on retweeting

[antsstyle]

Hi all - firstly, sorry if this is the wrong forum to ask this in, but I couldn’t figure out which one was the right one for it…

I’m investigating an issue where my retweets seem to be disappearing, and it’s sort of branched into the rules area. I’ve got a table of around 2000 tweets that I retweeted in the last few months and have since disappeared; when I view them in the webclient, it shows as not retweeted. When I try to retweet these tweets via the API, it works (proving that they are not registered as retweeted).

The problem is that, when I visit the original retweet IDs that I recorded at the time, they still work - so it seems as though something is removing my retweets, as I’m ending up with multiple valid retweet IDs for the same tweet. I am certain that I didn’t un-retweet them, as it would have taken me considerable time and effort to do that (and I have nothing in my app that performs un-retweet functionality).

What I want to establish is whether a Twitter system or algorithm is behind that action - I’m currently running through these “unretweeted” tweets and scheduling my app to retweet them again, but if something on Twitter’s end is unretweeting my retweets in the first place, it probably wouldn’t take kindly to me doing that.

[nate2xs]

I had a similar question. Are you using the API to retweets all the tweets from one account?

[antsstyle]

Yes, slowly retweeting these tweets from one account via the statuses/retweet/id endpoint.

[antsstyle]

Hi all,

I’m bumping this thread as I’ve now got concrete (well as concrete as I can possibly get) proof that this issue, if it is an issue, exists. I will write the details below.

In my local database, I keep a record of every tweet that my account tweets, including the original tweet’s ID, the ID of my retweet for that tweet, and the times each one occurred. In order to test this issue, I went through every row in the table, deleting any where retweets weren’t showing anymore, leaving only rows where I had retweeted a tweet and the API and webclient both show that I have retweeted it.

Now, after examining some rows in the table again, tweets that I retweeted have mysteriously been un-retweeted - the retweet status ID remains valid, and takes me to the original tweet, but both the API and Twitter webclient show me as not having retweeted that tweet, and I am 100% certain that I didn’t unretweet it myself.

Here’s an example row from the table in question: (for copy/pasting convenience, the original tweet ID is 967462673020522497, and the retweet’s status ID is 970442556071956481).

Is this supposed to be happening? I was not aware that retweets had a limited lifetime, so this seems like strange behaviour to me.