AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File
It’s a common practice whenever former President Donald Trump makes a comment on a topic to check and see what he said about it before, but if you want to check his old tweets, that’s no longer possible on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, rebranded as X after Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover.
Normally, if you conduct a search on X, either using the “search” window on the upper right of the web-based version or the “Explore” tab that’s on both the web and app version, you can refine your search several ways, including just including tweets by a specific user, restrict which dates to search, and search for certain words or phrases.
One way to access this is by typing in the search window “from:[username without the “@” symbol]” and then whatever terms you wish to find. For example, if I wanted to search for tweets by President Joe Biden about ice cream, I can search for “from:joebiden ice cream,” or I can find my own tweets about my orange tabby cat, Queso, by searching “from:rumpfshaker #quesothecat.” It’s pretty simple and you can customize it by searching for hashtags or by using quotation marks to search exact phrases, and so on.
You can also access user-based searches through the “Advanced Search” function available at https://x.com/search-advanced, where you can search for specific words, phrases, or hashtags, sent to or from specific accounts.
Neither of these options work for Trump’s old tweets.
This reporter first noticed the inability to search Trump’s tweets while researching his past comments about the stock market for an article on Monday (the tweets I included in that article were not found on Twitter, but by Googling for old articles that mentioned Trump tweets).
Searching for any past mention of the words “stock,” “stocks,” or “stock market” by @realdonaldtrump through the Advanced Search function brings back zero results.
Oddly, searching with the search window using “from:realdonaldtrump” and then looking for words like “stock,” “stocks,” or “stock market” brings back a chronologically-out-of-order selection of old Trump tweets that do not contain those search terms.
Trump’s account was suspended in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but was later reinstated by Musk. He has not posted anything new since regaining his account except for one tweet about his mugshot on Aug. 24, 2023, but the old tweets do remain up and publicly viewable.
Searching for tweets by other accounts known to have been suspended and not reinstated, like “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander (also known as Ali Akbar),account @ali, brings up zero results. Akbar was suspended after shocking allegations that he solicited nude photos from teenagers.
The account for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, @realalexjones, who was suspended and then reinstated, is fully searchable. For example, here are the search results for tweets by Jones that mention “Sandy Hook,” “Nick Fuentes,” and frogs.
Note that Vice President Kamala Harris’ tweets remain searchable as usual. Here are her tweets mentioning “Trump” or “Biden,” for example.
Mediaite spoke by telephone to a software engineer who specializes in query algorithms about what was going on with the search function, and why Trump’s old tweets might no longer be searchable. He asked to remain anonymous in order to talk about a political candidate without professional repercussions.
According to the software engineer, Twitter/X has long used GraphQL as the data query language to manage searches on the social media platform. He was able to replicate the same issue I had with searches for old Trump tweets coming up either with zero results or with a seemingly random collection of non-responsive results, and noted that for other previously suspended accounts, when the account was restored, “their index reappears as well,” making the old tweets once again searchable.
“So, Trump’s stuff should be there?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “This was deliberate.”
He explained that X must have either made the decision to not restore a searchable tweet index for restored accounts and then made an exception for Jones (despite the offensive content of many of his past tweets), or they do restore the searchable index of tweets for unsuspended accounts “but then purged Trump.”
Of course, Twitter/X itself is not the only place to find old Trump tweets. One free and searchable resource is the “Trump Twitter Archive,” which was created by a programmer who identified himself as “Brendan” and contains all old Trump tweets — even some deleted ones. The only exception so far is the Aug. 2023 mugshot tweet, which was posted after Musk changed the platform’s API and blocked that method of automatically scraping tweets.
Rick Wilson, the co-founder of the anti-Trump PAC The Lincoln Project, confirmed to Mediaite that their tech staff had collected Trump’s tweets as well. “We have them,” he said. Undoubtedly many other journalists, investigators, and activists have downloaded and archived the ex-president’s tweets as well.
So why would Musk’s platform block searches of Trump tweets, if they’re already out there and saved by the former president’s foes, plus posted online on other platforms?
One explanation may be connected to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing criminal prosecutions of the former president. Trump’s tweets — including a now-deleted one from Jan. 6, 2021 at 2:24 pm ET, in the midst of the rioting, in which he infamously wrote that Vice President “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to refuse to certify the election — have already been part of the evidence presented by the Jan. 6 House Select Committee and are undoubtedly part of Smith’s investigatory work as well.
Musk endorsed Trump in the aftermath of the assassination attempt and has taken to posting and promoting attacks on Harris, often including false or misleading content. It is not illogical to suspect he would not want to cooperate with any efforts to access Twitter data to prosecute Trump, including both his public tweets and any direct messages he may have sent to other users or communications with anyone at Twitter.
Unfortunately for Musk and his preferred presidential candidate,The New York Times reported a year ago that unsealed hearing transcripts from the case revealed that Smith’s office had indeed obtained “a trove” of Trump’s direct messages and drafts:
In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel’s office “all direct messages, the DMs” from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, including those sent, received and “stored in draft form.”
The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both “deleted” and “nondeleted” direct messages associated with Mr. Trump’s account…
The court papers unsealed on Tuesday revealed that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors sought “all content, records and other information” related to Mr. Trump’s Twitter account from October 2020 to January 2021, including all tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked or retweeted” by the account and all direct messages sent from, received by or stored in draft form by the account.
UPDATE Monday 8/12/2024 6:00 pm ET: The ability to search Trump’s tweets has been restored or fixed, and now functions as it should, including being able to search for old tweets by Trump mentioning specific words, hashtags, or phrases.
This article has been updated with additional information.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
