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I dealt with this problem on a photo site 15 years ago where people were embedding RAR pieces in their JPGs to use us as a distribution repository. The bandwidth increase was a giveaway so I just wrote an incoming processor that re-compressed everything that had more than X bytes per pixel. I can't believe Twitter doesn't have similar logic given its scale.

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Maybe they will just deal with it as you did: fix it when it becomes a problem.

Twitter does re-compress everything. This method survives re-compression.

Then it's not recompression. Recompression is pulling (let's say) a JPG into memory so it becomes a bitmap and writing it back out to a JPG. If you want to keep metadata you only keep a specific set and you cap the value lengths.

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