If you think that once a tweet is deleted or an account is deleted on Twitter it no longer exists it is not entirely true. There are several websites that take screenshots of content on the network. In addition, twitter itself allows you to download information from your account and you can also recover tweets that you have deleted.
In this article I will discuss how to recover deleted tweets or accounts that no longer exist on Twitter. There are many people who when they screw up use a simple trick that is to change their username. In this way, no one can locate them by their old name anymore. However, everything you posted with the previous account may be accessible on pages like archive.org or the google cache that we analyze below.
Wayback Machine – Internet Archive
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the network that allows people to revisit old versions of a web page. To recover deleted tweets you only need to put the URL of the Twitter profile, select a date range and you can see the deleted tweets in a few minutes. Therefore, what you have to do is:
- Go to archive.org/web to recover deleted tweets or accounts. State that if you try to search for your Twitter account it may not appear. Archive.org only captures Twitter accounts that are verified or have some relevance. If your account is not there, it means that the archive.org robot has not saved the information about it.
- Enter the Twitter account you are looking for or if you know the URL of the tweet. I use as an example a famous account that no longer exists of former US President Donald Trump. Twitter suspended Trump’s account in January 2021 due to multiple notices that account had and after what happened in the assault on the Capitol. The account to search is https://twitter.com/therealdonaldtrump, which if searched right now we get a message that it does not exist. If we look for it in archive.org it gives this result that can be seen in Fig. 1. and we can see several screenshots where old tweets from this account can be seen.
Google’s cache
Google’s cache is similar to how archive.org works. Save copies of web pages. There are many newspapers that publish an article and it has an error. Before, when newspapers were printed that error lasted forever in the printed version and was corrected with a Faith of errata. Today many journalists and content creators only change the text and give Save correcting the error. The google cache records an instant of time, with a timestagged. If you save the error of an article it will remain forever in that copy.
When you upload a photo to Twitter it is saved with a unique URL that is accessible if you have deleted the tweet. That fixed address can also be cached by google and saved. Therefore, the image is uploaded to a Twitter server and cannot be deleted.
To recover deleted tweets from the google cache you have to:
- Open Google and search for the deleted tweet.
- If the tweet is indexed you should see it in Google search.
- At the end of the address an arrow should appear and below it puts cache.
Download your account information to recover deleted tweets
Twitter has an option to download all your account information. It generates a file and in that file is everything you have done on Twitter, including the tweets you have deleted. To prove it I am going to delete this tweet https://twitter.com/AvDguez/status/1425348403328864256 which can be seen in Fig 2.
The first thing you have to do is log in to Twitter. Then tap on More on the left side of the screen and then go to Settings and privacy.
Next, we go to Your account (Your account in Spanish) and then Download an archive of your data (Download a file with your data in Spanish)
You will have to put the password of your account and if you have active the double factor authentication Twitter will send you an email or an SMS with a code. Once this is done, you can request the download of your data by clicking on the Request archive button.
Depending on your account activity, that file may take more or less time. Once it is done you will receive a confirm message and you can download the information.
Summary
In this article we talk about how tweets delete can be recover. There is a twitter archive and you can use some tools to see again deleted tweets. Search tweets is very interesting because there are many people who believe that deleting a tweet frees them from having written something unfortunate. In addition, this article shows how to find old tweets, how to search for tweets by date. Finding tweet is not a easy task. There is a cached twitter and man time one tweet was deleted by the tweet author.
