How to Find a Deleted Twitter or X Post Using Web Archives

Once a post is deleted from X (formerly Twitter), X won't show it again. You can only find it if someone saved a copy before it was deleted. Web archives are the best place to look, and the trick is searching them by the post's address, not its words.

Search the Wayback Machine by URL

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine saves copies of web pages, and it has captured a lot of tweets over the years. It can't search the text of tweets, so you search by address:

1. If you have the link to the post, paste it into web.archive.org. Try it in both forms, twitter.com/user/status/ID and x.com/user/status/ID, since older captures use the old address.
2. If you don't have the link, list everything archived under the account. Go to web.archive.org/web/*/twitter.com/username*, swapping in the handle. The Wayback Machine shows every captured URL that starts with that address, including individual status pages.
3. Open a capture from the calendar view. If you see a login wall instead of the post, try a capture from another date.

Wayback Quick Access does the first step in one click: on any page, it shows the latest archived copy and opens the full list of captures.

Try archive.today

archive.today (also at archive.ph) is a separate archive that people often use to save tweets on purpose, for example when a public figure's post is getting attention. Search it by the post's URL or the account's URL. It has a different set of captures from the Wayback Machine, so check both.

Look where the post was shared

• Quote posts and replies. Search X for the account's handle around the date. Other people quoting the post often repeat or show its text.
• Screenshots. Deleted posts from well-known accounts often live on as screenshots in news articles, Reddit threads and forum posts. Search the web for the handle plus a few words you remember.
• Embeds. When a news site embedded the post, the embed breaks after deletion, but the article usually quotes the text next to it.

If it was your own post

You can request a copy of your data from X's settings (look for downloading an archive of your data). It's worth checking, but don't count on a deleted post being in it.

The limits

• Archives only have posts someone, or a crawler, captured before the deletion. Plenty of posts were never captured.
• Posts from protected accounts aren't public, so archives don't have them.
• Since 2023, many captures of X pages show an error or a login prompt instead of the post. Older captures from twitter.com usually work better.
• Google no longer offers cached copies of pages, so its old cache trick doesn't work.

Treat what you find with care. An archived capture shows what a page looked like at that moment. A screenshot could be edited, so check it against an archive capture when you can.