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Politicians delete posts all the time,
sometimes within seconds. But what if
you could still see what they tried to
erase? Today, I'll show you the archives
that journalists and investigators rely
on to recover deleted tweets and vanish
statements and old posts from across the
political spectrum. You'll learn where
to find them, how to search them, and
how to dig back through time to see what
political figures were saying years
before those posts disappeared. Hi
everyone, and welcome back to this
series on how to do open-source
investigations from home. I'm Ben, and
this is part 28. So, let's get started.
Our first stop is the Trump archive. And
this is a complete mirror of Donald
Trump's Twitter history. every post he
ever made. Searchable by keyword, date,
or phrase. This is what journalists used
during 2020 to track narrative shifts
and contradictions. And it's reliable,
fast, and permanent. The second tool can
be found on the website Roll Call and
it's specifically called Factbase and
allows you to search a whole archive of
content around Donald Trump, White House
calendar, White House releases. And it
allows you to not only look at current
content such as videos and press
statements. And if we have a look at
some of the much older content, we can
see how some policies or keywords may
have changed in their context over time,
such as borders, for example, in
statements around 2015 right up until
recently. So, what about deleted posts?
Well, there's a website called Poly
Whoops, and it's from ProPublica, and
allows you to explore tweets that have
basically been deleted. Unfortunately,
due to a Twitter API change, Poly Whoops
currently does not track deletions, but
it's still got a pretty good archive of
content that's been deleted in the past.
And this is such a useful one to have a
look at content, especially that might
have been deleted after people realize
the sensitivity of that content as well.
The other useful tool to check out
deletions is also Trump's truth. And
this is a communityrun archive capturing
truth social posts. It's smaller. It's
less polished, but surprisingly
comprehensive. And especially for 2023
to 2024 when many posts never reach
mainstream platforms, but was still
posted to Truth Social. We could have a
look for the term, for example, witch
hunt, which allows us to see some of the
content that Trump was posting in the
beginning of 2024 and late 2023 around
using that term witch hunt, which was a
favorite phrase for that person at that
time. The next one is Polity Tweet,
which is a super interesting one. It's a
volunteer built tool tracking political
accounts across Twitter, Masten, and
Truth Social. It's kind of like a second
set of eyes because you can see that
many of these archives do a similar bit
of work. But it's very important
especially when there's a crackdown on
archives like these. What's interesting
about this is that we can search for
individuals or phrases up the top here
and we can we can see when those
accounts pop up how many things they
might have deleted. So here's Ronda
Santis with 14 deletions. We can see how
many have been archived. It's been last
updated today. monitored since 2022.
It's always important to never
underestimate small archives, especially
if they might capture the same content,
it might be archived or tagged a
different way. And this indicator of how
quick something has been deleted is a
really nice indicator to to look further
into some of these aspects. The takeaway
from this is that you don't always have
to rely on live feeds. You can use
things like the Wayback Machine for web
pages, but for social media, these five
archives that we've gone through are
your investigative backbone, especially
for public figures when they make a
statement and they might delete it.
These archives exist because information
shouldn't disappear when it's
convenient. Whether you're a journalist,
researcher, or a citizen investigator,
these sites keep the receipts of
democracy. If you've enjoyed this
session and want us to see more open
source investigative techniques and
tools, please do subscribe, like, and
share with a colleague or a friend, and
leave a comment in the section below as
to what you'd like to see covered in the
next one. Until then, take it easy.
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