# Can the New Owner of My X Account See Deleted Tweets > The fate of tweets you deleted prior to selling or transferring your X account, whether the new owner will be able to recover them, and more importantly what now remains permanently erased. - Source: https://tweetsweep.com/blog/can-the-new-owner-of-my-x-account-see-deleted-tweets - Published: 2026-11-02 - Reading time: 6 min --- ## The New Owner Sees When You Delete After you delete a tweet, X will take it from your public timeline and from search results. The removal is permanent on X servers — the new owner of the account can't log in and discover those posts somewhere on their timeline, in their notifications, or in any other interface owned by X. Tweets you've deleted prior to the transition of your account, meanwhile, no longer exist on X's database. Your timeline is what the new owner will see, minus anything you deleted, right at the time of transfer. As to deleting an X, You cannot delete it and there is no trash folder nor undo button. The only existing copy that may remain is yours, and you should download it before the transfer and never reveal it to its new owner. But the owner can view all items you have not deleted. Such as direct messages, liked tweets, lists you made, and any draft you left in the composer. Your followers list, profile bio and header, and all of your pinned post are also visible to them. If your goal is to not have anything left behind, in addition to deleting tweets you also have to delete your likes, DMs and any saved searches or muted words that are revealing. The account is now in the new owner's name, trained and set up just as you left it other than any posts you intentionally deleted. ## What survives deletion outside of x Deleted tweets tend to linger where a new owner can access them without logging into your account. Your older posts can linger in Google caches for weeks after they are deleted. At the instant before you delete, The Wayback Machine may or may not have archived your timeline. Any third-party analytics tools that requested access to your account prior to the transfer still have copies of your tweet text, engagement data, and media URLs. If you know where to look, these sources are publicly browsable. Your old handle is searchable on Google by the new owner and they can pull up cached pages to read posts you thought had long-since disappeared. They can even read quote tweets of users that mention your deleted content. Screenshots are the most difficult to track. Your tweets could have been screen-shotted anyone can post them to social media before you delete. For instance, the new owner may receive messages from individuals who took screenshots asking if the account has changed owners. You cannot prevent this. Instead, here is a list of things you can do: delete in bulk pre-transfer and then track your old handle on search engines and social listening tools for at least one month post handover. If it resurface, it cannot be deleted - the account does not belong to you anymore and whoever takes her can only delete what exists at that moment, not what had existed by transferring it. ## The New Owner – How the Archive Works Available at the end of X, account owners can download their complete archive with every tweet and like sent, every DM received and all media files ever posted. If you delete tweets and then transfer the account, they can ask for a new archive. Only those posts that exist when you download this archive will be there. It won't count anything you deleted prior to the transfer. This archive is based off X's live database, not an old backup; The new owner cannot recover your deleted tweets by asking for an archive. But if you had downloaded your own archive before the transfer and saved somewhere, then the new owner could access that file if it is in the email connected to your account or a cloud service. It is recommended that the best approach you download your archive and save it on a device or service under your control, log out of all logged sessions prior to giving away the account credentials. Avoid storing the archive file in both email inboxes of your account as well as on any shared drive. The new owner will know the e-mail address used to create the account, so all documents attached to that e-mail are readable. ## Transfer Restrictions X have a deletion API that permits 50 delete requests per 15 minutes per user. This limit applies not only for bulk deletion tools such as TweetSweep, but also when removing tweets manually from the interface. You should start early if you are cleaning up an account with thousands of posts prior to a transfer. The tool is capable of running at full efficiency, which helps eliminate around 200 tweets per hour in a single session. So if a user has 10,000 tweets to delete, that will take around 50 hours of active deletion over several days. X is per user, not per app, and you can't break the limit by using multiple tools at once. And while you delete, you are still burning your own API rate limit for read requests. It starts counting against your limits every time that the tool requests to get a tweet whether or not it should be deleted. That activity will feed into the same pool as another user scrolling through their timeline or running searches. Schedule your cleanup at a time where you don't need to actively use X, and begin deleting at least two full weeks before your scheduled transfer date; always expect rate limits or interruptions, and maybe even that some posts will not delete the first try and need a retry. ## What the New Owner Will Not Be Able to Access The new owner was unable to view deleted tweets from any X property. They cannot be found in search, in the API or default data export. In any case, X support can not retrieve them - there is no possibility to restore deleted posts for any account, even if the ownership changes. It should be noted that if you set your account to private before deleting, they will also not see your protected tweets since private tweets are never indexed and disappear from the public record entirely once deleted from a protected (private) account. And even if they own your messages after you delete them, the new owner has no access to any direct messages unless the other person in the correspondence keeps a copy. X stores deleted DMs on its servers Others will not be able to see your deleted likes or retweets. They are not able to see your replies that you have deleted from the original thread — those disappear too, but they do still see the thread itself. The only remnant that might remain is a notification the other person got at the time of reply, and it remains in their notifications until they delete it. However, the new owner cannot access that alert on your account. ## Preparing the account prior to transfer To begin with, download your entire archive. To do this, navigate to Settings > Your Account > Download an archive of your data. You will receive an email with a ZIP file from X when it is ready, which can take anywhere from hours to days based on the size of your account. Put this file in a place you only own it Leave it neither on the account's email nor in any common folder. Get the archive and start deleting in bulk. Use a tool with OAuth-based authentication (Read and Write access is checked, otherwise deletion is not allowed without sharing the password) Erased: all tweets, retweets, replies, likes DMs and saved searches. Remove apps with access to your account and third-party access. If you want to not have the old email, replace account e-mail with yours (preferably new). Stripping the account of the phone number. If the account contained X Premium or any advertising credit, remove all credit card or payment details immediately. Now change the Password and pass them the credential. Your last ever owner will be in total control, but any deleted data before the transfer passes to them won't be visible. Do a final search on google and X (itself) for your old handle to validate deleted objects are removed from indexing. If any remains, ask Google to remove it with its expired content form.