This morning, as with every morning, I had my morning scroll of X. I like to catch up on what's been happening while I've been asleep, as most of the people I follow have been active in the hours that I have not. There's a magazine I like to read from Japan that was released today, for example — and all my favorite artists featured in the magazine are posting images on X of their work featured in this month's issue.
The moment I click on an image, however, I am not taken to a larger version of the image, but to the electoral commission site of the UK political party, Reform UK, an organization I have zero interest in.
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What's going on?
First, some information about how I suffered the bug. I use an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the official X app. The image was from a Japanese X account, and had nothing to do with the upcoming UK election. By all accounts, I shouldn't have been taken to the Reform UK site — so why was I?
I'm not the only user affected by the bug. Check out all the other users reporting the 'twitter link bug', and how they're being taken to unrelated links when clicking images and other shortcuts. Interestingly, while I can replicate the bug reliably just by tapping around various images, the moment you go to screen record, it seems to completely stop.
We reached out to X about the bug and only received the typically Musk-like auto-response of "Busy now, please check back later." Ever since the billionaire has taken over the site, bugs have cropped up all over the place, from extremely x-rated porn bots to frequent outages. X might not die overnight, but it's looking less and less a viable platform to keep using.
I managed to get to the image I wanted in the end — but only after attempting to record my experience.
