How to See Old Tweets on iPhone or iPad

Last Updated: March 29, 2019 Tested

This wikiHow teaches you how to find someone’s old tweets using Twitter’s Advanced Search form on an iPhone or iPad. As long as the user hasn’t deleted their tweets, made them private, or blocked your account, you can easily find every tweet they sent between two specific dates.

Steps

1
Find out when the user joined Twitter. To find someone’s oldest tweets, you’ll need to figure out the month and year they created their account. Here's how to find someone's join date:
- Open Twitter (the blue icon with a white bird typically found on the home screen).
- Go to the user's profile by tapping their username or photo on a tweet.
- Find the join date next to ″Joined″ at the top of the profile (under the name and location).
- Return to the home screen once you've written down or memorized the date.
2
Go to https://www.twitter.com/search-advanced in Safari. Since Twitter’s Advanced Search isn’t a part of the official Twitter app, you’ll need to use a web browser to search for old tweets.
- Safari is the blue, red, and white compass icon typically found on the home screen.
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3
Sign in to your Twitter account. If you’re not already signed in, tap Log In near the top-right corner, enter your username and password, then tap Log in now.
- A Twitter search page will appear, but it won't be the Advanced Search form just yet.
4
Swipe down on the page to show the toolbar. It’s the gray bar with blue icons at the bottom of the page.
5
Tap the Share
icon. It’s near the center of the toolbar.
6
Swipe left across the bottom row of icons and tap Request Desktop Site. It’s near the middle of the row. The website will refresh to show a white form that says ″Advanced Search″ at the top.
- If your iPhone has a small screen, you’ll probably have to zoom in to see the text and fields.
- To zoom in, place two fingers together on the part of the screen you want to enlarge, then spread your fingers apart. To zoom back out, pinch two fingers together on the screen.
7
Type the person's username into the ″From these accounts″ box. It’s the first option under the ″People″ header.^{[1]
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- Don’t include the ″@″ symbol. For example, if you’re looking for @wikiHow’s old tweets, just type wikihow into the field.
- To find your own old tweets, type your own username.
8
Enter the date range for the tweets you want to see. Scroll down to the ″Dates″ header, and then specify a beginning and end date for your search. Here’s how:
- Tap the first blank beside ″From this date″ to open the calendar, tap the arrow at the calendar's top-left corner until you reach the month and year the user joined, tap the 1st date of that month, and then tap Done.
- Tap the second blank (to the right of ″to″), tap the last date for which you want to see tweets, and then tap Done.
9
Refine your search results (optional). If you want to see all of a user’s tweets from the selected time period, skip to the next step. Otherwise, browse these other sections to see if additional filters would improve your results:
- Words: In the section at the top of the page, you can decide to show only the tweets that contain (or omit) certain words, phrases, hashtags.
- People: To only see tweets the selected user sent to another username, type the other username into the ″To these accounts″ field (under the ″People″ header).
- Places: Select a location under this header if you want to display the user’s tweets from the selected time period that were sent from a specific location.
10
Tap Search. It’s the pink button at the bottom-left corner of the form. Twitter will now display all tweets the selected user sent between the dates you specified.
- If you need to further filter the search results, tap one of the options in the ″Search filters″ box near the top-left corner of the page.