Old Twitter Photos Are Getting Swapped Out and It's Pure Chaos [Update]

A tweet from the official Chicago Cubs account posted back in 2012 got a new wave of attention online this afternoon thanks to its explicit content. The tweet read: “Hall of Famer Billy Williams sang tonight’s 7th inning stretch with his two grandsons” and featured a pornographic image, not the Cubs Hall of Famer or any member of his family.

It’s since been deleted, but the screenshots will live forever and can be found with some minimal effort. For those not inclined to see them in full glory, just think of it as a sequel to the infamous 2014 U.S. Airways tweet, also NSFW.

We’ve reached out to the Cubs in an attempt to figure out what happened here.

One possibility is that the third-party app originally used to share the Williams photo is now linking to the less suitable content. None of the responses to the tweet from 2012 suggest anything out of the ordinary was going on at that time.

If that is indeed what happened, there’s going to be a heck of a lot of verified accounts out there scrambling to take down now-graphic images from the archives. And that would seem to be more a reactive than proactive task as one wouldn’t know when the issue would crop up.

UPDATE: There is more evidence to suggest this is the case, and the Cubs are far from the only professional team impacted. 12UP has a plethora of tweets from franchises where the art does not match the description. Most appear to be from Twitpic, one of the aforementioned third-party apps.

It’s probably not the worst idea to see what your 2011 tweet of a beautiful sunset or 2012 post about the first spiced latte of the season looks like now. Could be a totally different and you’d never know it.

[Awful Announcing]