Trumps ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet

When Twitter banned President Trump from its platform permanently on Friday, the thousands of tweets he put forth from his realDonaldTrump account over the past decade were wiped out. Retweets of realDonaldTrump tweets from other accounts now show a “this tweet is unavailable” message instead.

But embeds of Trump’s original tweets are now displaying in articles across the internet as shadows of their former selves, some with just the text of the former tweet included, others as empty gray boxes.

This effect, known as link rot, happens when images or content are deleted or otherwise broken, so links don’t point back to the original target, whether that’s a tweet, a video, or a web page. In most instances, a dead link is a visually...

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