You could have embarrassing old tweets and potentially want to delete them but don’t know how to. Twitter often seems like a firehose of information that flows by faster than we can comprehend. Luckily, it’s possible to merely take a sip by searching for tweets from a specific date or date range. Here’s how to search for tweets from a specific date or time period.
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Here is how to search for tweets from a specific date range using advanced search
Twitter provides both a mobile and a desktop browser Advanced Search page that lets you search for tweets posted within a certain date range. If you’re on a mobile device, open your browser and visit https://mobile.twitter.com/search-advanced. If you’re on a desktop browser, go to https://twitter.com/search-advanced?lang=en.
On the Advanced Search Page, scroll all the way down to the bottom until you see the “Dates” section. There, you’ll find two parameters: “From” and “To.”
The first step on how to search for tweets from a specific date is to choose your desired month, day, and year for each parameter. Here’s what they do:
- From: Set this to find tweets posted after midnight (12:00 a.m.) on this date.
- To: Set this to find tweets posted up until midnight (12:00 a.m.) on this date.
While this sounds simple, using the parameters can be kind of confusing. For example, if you want to find tweets only from May 1, 2014, you’d set “From” to “May 1, 2014” and “To” to “May 2, 2014.” You’ll get tweets posted between midnight on May 1 until midnight on May 2. You wouldn’t set both fields to the same date.
Similarly, if you wanted to find only tweets from the month of May 2014, you’d set “From” to “May 1, 2014” and “To” to “June 1, 2014.” That way, your search will cover all 31 days of May.
Next, scroll up and enter another parameter, such as a search term in the “Words” section, or an account name in the “Accounts” section. Click “Search” when you’re done.
When you see the results, you can further sort them by different criteria using tabs located just below the search bar. “Top” shows the matching tweets with the most engagement. “Latest” shows all matching tweets in reverse chronological order.
Likewise, you can find results that match people, photos, or videos by clicking the other result tabs.
If you need to do another search, just revisit Twitter’s advanced search page and search again. It includes many powerful parameters that allow you to finely narrow down tweets on certain dates to or from certain people in certain geographic areas, and much more.
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Search tweets from a date range using inline parameters
If the Twitter advanced search link isn’t handy, you can also search for tweets from a specific date or dates using inline search parameters that you type directly into the search box in the Twitter app or on the Twitter website.
Here are three parameters that will come in handy:
- From: Find tweets posted only by this Twitter account (Example:
from:benjedwardsorfrom:howtogeek). - Since: Find tweets posted since 12:00 a.m. on this date. The date format is YYYY-MM-DD (Example:
since:2021-05-01). - Until: Find tweets posted until 12:00 a.m. on this date. The date format is YYYY-MM-DD (Example:
until:2021-06-01).
For example, if you’d like to see all tweets posted by the “TechRafiki” Twitter account between May 1, 2021, and June 1, 2021, you’d type this into the Twitter search box:
from:techrafiki until:2021-06-01 since:2021-05-01
If you wanted to find all posts about “Atari” by “benjedwards” posted on November 2, 2020, you’d type:
atari from:benjedwards since:2021-11-01 until:2021-11-03
After these short steps on how to search for tweets from a specific date, you can easily delete all those tweets that you’re scared people might dig up.
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