We’ve been living with social media for a long time now — Facebook opened up to the public in 2006 — and that means a lengthy trail of posts stretching back through the years. While this does let you take a nostalgic trip into the past with just a few clicks, it can also bring up some embarrassing and awkward memories.
Maybe your Twitter takes from 10 years ago haven’t aged well, or there’s an ex-partner you’d rather not remember, or you’re heading for a job interview and don’t want your would-be employers to judge who you are now from your decades-old social media posts.
Whatever the reason, you can find and delete ancient social media posts without too much difficulty using the web or mobile apps. (They say that anything on the internet is forever, of course, but you can do your best to at least somewhat mute your mistakes. Who knows? Maybe your potential new boss never heard of the Wayback Machine.) We’ve included instructions for Facebook, X, and Instagram, as these are the places where you’re most likely to have posted content you’ve long since forgotten about.
Facebook is closing in on 20 years of being available to anyone with an email address, so let’s start there. If you were around when Facebook first arrived, you’ll remember personal status updates were much more common than they are now — people even used to write on each other’s profiles, MySpace-style.
The easiest way to find your oldest posts is to load Facebook on the web:
- Select your name (on the left) to see your profile.
- At the top of the column with your posts listed on them (just below the What’s on your mind? field), look for and click on the Filters button.
- Use the Go to drop-down menu to find the year you joined Facebook. (Don’t remember when you joined? We’ll tell you how to find that info in a moment.)
- Click Done to see posts from that year.
You can go back through your posts on mobile, too.
- Open your Facebook profile in the mobile app.
- Scroll down to your posts and look for (and tap) the Filters link to the right.
- With mobile, it’s a little more awkward; you can’t just jump to specific years but must tap through a calendar instead.
Don’t remember when you joined Facebook? That’s something you can find out, although the process is a little complicated:
- Open Facebook and click your profile picture.
- Select Settings & Privacy > Settings.
- Look for the Account Center on the right side of your page. Select it and then go to Your Information and Permissions > Access Your Information > Personal Information.
- Your account creation date will be the first thing under Profile information.
- Select your profile image in the upper-right corner.
- Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Account Center > Your information and permissions > Access your information > Personal information.
- As with the web version, if you look for Profile information, you’ll see the date you created your account.
If you have a lot of posts to sift through, you can use other filters (like month) to narrow down the results. If you see something you want to get rid of, just click the three dots next to it, then click Delete post.
X / Twitter
X, which was previously known as Twitter, can often be a place for opinions and takes, and it’s possible — even probable — that some of them have aged better than others. If you want to go down memory lane (and assuming you haven’t already deactivated your account), you can get to your oldest tweets in a few ways, but using the platform’s built-in search engine is the most straightforward.
- Type (from:username) until:yyyy-mm-dd since:yyyy-mm-dd in the search box at the top of the page.
- Change the username to your X handle, adjust the dates, and then hit Enter.
- Click the Latest tab at the top to sort the posts chronologically.
To delete a tweet, click the three dots next to it, then click Delete.
If you don’t remember when you first joined, go to your Profile; the date you joined should be beneath your description.
If you want to use the mobile app for X instead, you can use the same search terms as above to find your tweets. Just tap the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen to get to the search box.
Instagram is only a few years behind Facebook and X when it comes to age, appearing in public for the first time in 2010. That’s a lot of years for photos and videos to build up on your public feed, even if a lot of Instagram activity is focused on Stories, which automatically disappear.
Here, you’re best off using the Instagram app on mobile:
- Tap your profile picture (bottom right).
- Tap on the three horizontal lines (top right).
- Choose Your activity > Posts.
- Tap Newest to oldest and change it to Oldest to newest.
Your first-ever Instagram posts will then appear at the top of the screen. If you want to be more specific in your search, tap the All dates drop-down menu, which lets you look for Instagram posts within a specific date range.
If you see something you’d rather not have on your Instagram profile, tap on the post, tap the three dots in the top-right corner, and then choose Delete. The same menu lets you archive a post, which means you can still see it (and all the comments and likes), but it’s hidden for everyone else.