Who keeps copies of your deleted X posts, and how to remove them

What deleting on X does, and what it leaves

X's help page on deleting posts says a deleted post leaves your profile, your followers' timelines and X's own search, and reposts of it go with it. Two kinds of copy stay: posts where someone pasted your words into their own, and quote posts that added a comment. For everything off the platform, X is direct: "We cannot remove posts that are not on x.com".

X offers no bulk delete, so posts go one at a time. Editing is not a way to scrub old text either: Edit post is a Premium feature limited to the first hour, and anyone can open the earlier versions. Protecting your posts hides them from people who do not follow you and from search engines such as Google, but it does nothing to copies already made.

The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine keeps snapshots of individual pages that a person or a crawler chose to save. It is not a record of everything an account posted: a post is there only if its page was saved. Older snapshots sit under twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com addresses and newer ones under x.com, so a check needs to cover all three.

The Internet Archive's removal page asks for an email to info@archive.org giving the exact URLs, the period you want excluded, and the period during which you controlled the account. It says it makes no promise about the outcome in advance. Intimate images have a separate route, a form rather than an email address.

archive.today

archive.today (also reached as archive.ph and archive.is) saves single pages when a visitor submits them, and its FAQ says it intends to keep them indefinitely. On deletion, the FAQ names only pages that break its hosting provider's rules, and empty or error pages. Asked whether outdated information can be changed or removed, it answers that the archive only certifies that a page existed at a given moment.

Each snapshot carries a "report bug or abuse" link. archive.today publishes no process or turnaround for requests from the person shown in a page, so a report there is a request with no stated rules. If a snapshot of yours causes real harm, advice from a lawyer in your country may be the more useful next step.

Thread republishers

Some services turn a thread into a single readable page when someone asks their bot to. Only threads that were actually unrolled are held, and most accounts have none.

• Thread Reader App has the clearest route. Its help page says you can log in with your X account and choose threads to remove, which takes them off its server at once, with up to 24 hours to clear caches. Posting @ThreadReaderApp BLOCK ME (the capitals matter) stops future unrolls; others can still ask, and the app replies that the author declined. It also says anything deleted on X is deleted from its site, checked several times a day. Contact: hello@threadreaderapp.com.
• Rattibha describes itself as collecting threads recommended by X users. Its terms mention deleting unlawful threads, and its about page gives support@rattibha.com. We found nothing on author removals or on following deletions from X.
• UnrollThread has a privacy policy saying you can ask it to erase personal data it holds, and a contact form. It publishes nothing specific about unrolled threads.

Old search results

A deleted post can linger in Google's results for a while. Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool is for pages that no longer exist or have changed significantly, on sites you do not own. It needs a Google account, and it changes only Google's results: an archived copy elsewhere stays where it is.

Data companies and public datasets

Companies that take X data under X's Developer Policy must delete content that was deleted on X, as soon as reasonably possible or within 24 hours of a request from X or the account owner. The same policy lets them share datasets only as post and user IDs, which cannot be turned back into text once the post is gone. For these, deleting on X is the request.

Bright Data sells datasets of X posts and profiles. Its data check page takes an email address, and says to write to privacy@brightdata.com about other contact details, which is the route for an X handle. Whether it must delete depends on the data protection law where you live.

Other copies were scraped outside that policy and published openly on Hugging Face. One dataset card says its items, about 179 million of them from x.com, were captured in close to real time, which allows study of posts after deletion; the company behind it was dissolved in November 2025. Hundreds of further datasets from a network called Bittensor Subnet 13 carry post text with usernames encoded, and the operator's miner policy places data protection duties on each contributor. The route that exists is Hugging Face's own, under its content policy: email safety@huggingface.co, because the Report button on a dataset opens a public report. A deletion on X does not reach these files.

Services that track old usernames

memory.lol maps X accounts to the usernames they used before. Its README says public lookups mostly cover the last 60 days, that some accounts are excluded at their owner's request, and that safety or privacy concerns can be raised with the maintainer privately. lolarchiver sells profile history lookups and a keyword search over archived posts. Its removal page promises removal within 30 days through contact@lolarchiver.com, though the page is written for its database search and does not say whether the X tools are covered.

An order that keeps your options open

1. Note the addresses first. Write down the post and profile URLs you care about, under both twitter.com and x.com.
2. Delete the posts on X. Under X's own rules this is what obliges licensed data customers to delete their copies, and Thread Reader App says it follows deletions.
3. Log in to Thread Reader App to remove anything left, and post the opt-out if you want no future unrolls.
4. Write to each archive and company that applies: info@archive.org, Bright Data, Hugging Face and lolarchiver, plus archive.today's report link, which has no stated process behind it.
5. Ask Google to refresh results for pages that are now gone.
6. Delete the account last, if at all. Several of these routes ask you to show you controlled it.

MediaWipeTool's X tool lists these services, builds the link to check each one, and writes the request text for you to send. It contacts nobody on your behalf: you read each request and send it yourself.

What no request reaches

• Files someone already downloaded, including dataset copies and screenshots.
• Quote posts and pasted copies on X made by other accounts.
• Services that have closed. ProPublica's Politwoops page says it is no longer maintained, and Nitter, a front end that only displayed live posts and held nothing to remove, closed its main instances in September 2026 after legal action by X.

Apart from Thread Reader App, whose privacy policy commits to answering data requests within a month, and lolarchiver, whose removal page promises 30 days, none of these operators publishes a response time for removal requests, so we give none. Processes change; check each operator's page before you rely on it.