As with other social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, compliance and legal professionals often need to archive X accounts for official use.
X has remained, after its rebrand from Twitter, one of the most widely used social media sites for companies and government agencies. The change has not come without controversy, though, as major companies like Disney and Apple paused advertising on the platform after new owner Elon Musk wrote and boosted antisemitic posts.
Musk’s late-2022 purchase of Twitter also preceded a broader increase in hate speech on X. In response, many companies stopped posting on the platform. Even if your company or organization has left X, the need to archive posts has not gone away —especially if you’re operating in a highly regulated industry.
At a glance, X archiving typically satisfies part of the FOIA and open records recordkeeping requirements for public entities. In the private sector, archiving generally happens in anticipation of or response to regulatory audits or legal matters.
Below is important information about staying current with X’s updated archiving procedures and policies to avoid penalties, compliance headaches, and reduced public trust.
The rebranding of X goes beyond aesthetics. Musk has adopted a posture that’s more forgiving of controversial speech, which many critics say has allowed hate speech to proliferate on the app. Interestingly, though, the number of suspended accounts increased dramatically in the first year after Musk’s purchase.
Another substantive change has been the introduction of X Premium, which gives paid subscribers a slew of benefits—including the ability to edit posts. The site's increased volatility makes proper archiving even more essential for businesses and government agencies.
Leaving X does not mean your company can forget about everything it posted on the platform. For example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires broker-dealers and certain other financial firms to retain records of business communications going back three years. The retention period may be longer for many federal agencies under FOIA requirements and state agencies subject to various open records laws.
Litigation, non-legal disputes, and investigations also place importance on X archives. Discovery—which can apply to deleted, deactivated, or inactive accounts—flows a lot more efficiently when you have reliable account archives. If nothing else, archives provide organizations with institutional knowledge and records critical for brand protection.
The simplest option for downloading X data is to use the in-app function, which you can do by going to the account’s “Home” page and clicking “More” in the bottom-left corner (if you’re working on a PC). You’ll then select “Settings and privacy” from the pop-up menu.
Click the first option under “Settings,” which is “Your account.” Next, shift your attention to the right-hand side of the screen and click “Download an archive of your data.”
X will likely ask you to verify your login with a code sent via text or email.
After completing the two-factor authentication, you’ll be able to request your X archive; click “Request archive,” a blue button, on the right side of your screen.
It may take up to 24 hours for your archive to be ready for download, at which point X will email you a link to download it.
After logging in and completing two-factor authentication for (at least) the second time, click “Download archive” on the right side of your screen.
Then click the blue “Download archive” button.
You will be taken to a new screen where you must click “Download Archive” once more, and X will start the process of sending the archive to your computer.
The download will be in the form of a ZIP file, which will need to be extracted. After you’ve extracted the ZIP file, you’ll be left with something resembling the following:
The file titled “Your archive.html” can open in your default web browser after double-clicking the icon.
What you’re provided with, essentially, is a bare-bones version of your X account. From here, you can view your posts, Reposts, Replies, Likes, Messages, and other interactions.
Inside an exported X (Twitter) data archive showing Tweets view.
For personal reference, the user-friendly HTML view is likely sufficient. But if your goal is compliance or legal defensibility, there are important limitations to understand.
When you download your X archive, the files are generated at the time of your request and saved locally. There’s no digital signature and no documented chain of custody.
That means:
Once the file is downloaded, there is no built-in mechanism to prove it hasn’t been altered. If authenticity is challenged, you carry the burden of proving:
If you ever need to present that data in court, during an audit, or in response to a records request, you have no built-in way to prove the file hasn’t been modified. You would have to manually document and defend that process yourself—which introduces unnecessary risk.
Under evidentiary standards like the Federal Rules of Evidence, digital records often need to be self-authenticating or supported by reliable proof of integrity. X’s native export file does not meet that threshold.
Native exports reflect what exists in the account at the time you request the download. If content was deleted before the export was generated, it will not be included.
That means:
For regulated industries and public-sector organizations, this distinction matters.
For example, SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 require broker-dealers to create and preserve accurate records in tamper-proof formats. These rules are built around proactive preservation — not retroactive downloads of currently visible content.
Similarly, government agencies subject to FOIA and state open records laws must preserve public records regardless of format. Producing what is live today is not the same as maintaining a complete historical record.
Once something is deleted, it may still be considered a record — but the native export cannot recover it.
The native export is a one-time download.
It does not:
For individuals, that may not matter.
But for organizations required to retain communications over multi-year periods — and to demonstrate active supervision — a periodic manual download does not function as a records management system because it is reactive, not proactive.
Even though the HTML version included in the export is easy to view, the files are not structured for effective courtroom presentation.
When you introduce social media evidence in court, you typically need to attach documentation that will answer very specific questions, like:
In practice, you need to present this information clearly, in a format that is:
The native X archive is not designed for that purpose.
While the HTML archive is readable in a browser, there is no clean, standardized way to export what you see on screen — complete with context and metadata — into a presentation-ready format suitable for court or formal investigation.
You cannot simply generate a properly formatted, authenticated exhibit package for each tweet.
You’ll need to dive into the JavaScript files in the downloaded “data” folder to retrieve something that may pass muster in an investigation or legal matter. If you need help using the archive files, the “READ ME” JavaScript file contains a general navigation guide.
As is so often the case with these kinds of archive downloads, however, the content has been broken apart and stripped of context. Here is what a portion of that folder may look like for you:
All the images from posts can be found in the “tweet_media” folder, while the posts themselves can be found in the “tweets.js” file. When you view this .js file through a JSON viewer, you’ll see something like this:
All posts from the account have been strung together and stripped of their context, including their associated media. On the positive side, “tweets.js” is at least a single file that could be authenticated with a hash value, but the content is difficult to understand at a glance and hardly the sort of thing you’d want to present in court.
Instead, you would need to:
And you would need to repeat that process for every single post entered into evidence.
For a single tweet, this may be manageable.
For dozens, hundreds, or years of content, it becomes operationally burdensome — and increases the likelihood of inconsistency or error.
At first glance, simply taking screenshots of relevant posts can seem like a good solution, but manually capturing static images like this can introduce certain issues:
For the reasons listed above, static images are not the ideal way to collect and preserve posts—at least not for a legal matter or regulatory audit. In many ways, screenshots provide less authenticity than X’s native archive download and are more suited for personal records.
When it comes to collecting and preserving data for legal and compliance purposes, a preferable alternative is to use an automated archiving solution that archives X content in real time, like Pagefreezer’s Social Media Archiving solution.
With real-time, automated social media capture, your organization can:
Generally, X users are limited to archiving only posts and replies from their own accounts. Even likes, which were previously visible to all users, are no longer accessible from outside the user account.
Although legal discovery and subpoenas can compel parties to give access to private X content from third-party accounts, those options may not be available in preliminary investigations such as open-source intelligence (OSINT) inquiries.
In situations involving harassment, defamation, and ads adjacent to objectionable content, time is of the essence, as the content in question can be deleted at any time. However, screenshotting and other manual capture of posts, comments, and threads can be cumbersome and waste valuable time.
Fortunately, better options exist for organizations looking to capture the full context of certain social media content for audits, investigations, and litigation. WebPreserver, is designed for uber-efficient documentation of third-party X content and other third-party web content.
With just a few clicks, users can capture long, collapsed comment threads and entire timelines to save your team time and energy on manual capture. This means when you spot evidence online, it can be collected immediately, before it gets deleted or edited. WebPreserver also ensures captured files have associated metadata and digital signatures to ensure their legal defensibility.
Users wanting to capture X content indeed have a few options for archiving, but, depending on the context, some methods may be less appropriate than others.
In most cases, the following should apply:
The substantial changes x has undergone, including the paradigm shift to a less moderated environment and its cascading effects, have made content capture trickier but no less important for legal, compliance, and investigative teams. Additionally, leaving the platform in response to X’s changes does not mean that archiving obligations no longer apply to companies and government agencies.
If your organization relies on X (or relied on it in the past) for outreach, customer engagement, or public communication, downloading a ZIP file isn’t enough to reduce compliance risk.
Pagefreezer’s Social Media Archiving solution automatically captures your X content in real time — preserving posts, replies, edits, deletions, and metadata in a tamper-proof, searchable archive.
That means:
Instead, you get defensible, court-ready records that help you respond to FOIA requests, regulatory audits, and legal matters with confidence.
If X is part of your communications strategy — past or present — it should be part of your archiving strategy too.