It happens almost every day. A screenshot of a social media post from a prominent figure like Elon Musk or Donald Trump goes viral because it demonstrates just how stupid these men really are. But sometimes it sounds too good to be true. You go to check X or Truth Social yourself and it’s not there. But maybe it was deleted. What do you do? Well, we’ve got some tips that might be helpful for uncovering the truth.
Right off the bat, it’s important to note that there’s not always a foolproof way to figure out if a “deleted” tweet was real, especially if it’s not from a famous person. But there are things you can do to get closer to the truth. And with a little bit of detective work, you can often figure out if that deleted tweet ever existed.
Tip 1: Search the text yourself
The first step in any tweet fact-check involves looking for the original post yourself on the platform where it appears to have originated, whether it was X, Facebook, or Truth Social. The easiest way to do that is to take a snippet of the text you found in a screenshot and search using quotation marks. You don’t need to use the entire tweet; just a portion will be fine.
Let’s take an example of an old tweet from Musk. Below is a tweet that I screenshotted on Nov. 23, 2023, but Musk later deleted. If you saw this screenshot floating around and wanted to verify if it was real, you could go to X and search the phrase “What say you major brands?”
That search yields a few results that look like bots just repeating what Musk said:
And if you scroll down through those tweets, there’s even a link to the original tweet from Musk. Clicking on that brings you to a notice that reads “Hmm…this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.”
It seems we have confirmed that the tweet was real since we found the original URL, quoting the text we saw in a screenshot, and it’s coming up with an error message. But what happens if you don’t see any solid leads like that in the social media app where the post appeared to originate?
Tip 2: See if a reliable source has quoted the tweet
Check out a resource like news.google.com and search your snippet of text there. A quick search for “What say you major brands?” doesn’t come up with any hits, but that’s not unexpected. The content of this Musk tweet doesn’t appear to be particularly notable. The Tesla CEO often tweets hundreds of times each day, so it’s unlikely that news outlets are going to write a story about everything. But that brings us to other clues about whether something should be in the news.
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