X (Twitter) OSINT Guide: Search Operators & Archived Profile Analysis
December 2025
There are hidden treasures in the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and in this blog, we're going to show you how to find them. X is one of the most common platforms we come across here at Social Hunter, and from our experience, we KNOW that most of you don't know how to navigate it correctly. That's okay, we're going to fix that. When you receive a Social Hunter report, we're confident that you're going to go through the findings to see what is being posted by the individual in question. You're going to experience two main scenarios: the profile is going to be public, and you can view the person's feed, or it will be private, and you won't be able to see anything other than the bio. In both instances, most people stop looking. That is a crucial mistake, as there is plenty more to see.
There are three very useful X operators when continuing to look at a person's X profile, public OR private.
- from:(username) Using the from: operator in the search bar will show all public posts that are from the specified user and on other publicly available posts. This search will only yield results when the profile is public.
- to:(username) Using the to: operator in the search bar will show all public posts that are directed towards the specific user as a reply. This works even if the specific user's profile is private!
- @username Using the @ operator in the search bar will show a combination of public mentions of the specific user, meaning the original post and NOT a reply. It will also include replies to a post that you would discover using the to:(username) search. This also works when the specific user profile is private!
As an example, we're going to use the @ChefReactions account. You can see below that the profile is private, yet we are still able to find activity and engagement with the profile. We can see the profile is private, yet we can still see all the public replies and public mentions using these operators.
With the above information at hand, we know that the way in which you navigate X profiles will be more comprehensive and complete. You should no longer see an X profile and just move along when it's private, or just scroll the profile feed and think that's all there is to it.
We did promise treasures, however, right? This next information treasure trove is so well hidden, it's not even on X.
If you are not familiar with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine...where have you been?! Those of you familiar with this awesome resource most likely use it for tracking and looking at website changes. X/Twitter, however, is one of the few social media platforms that was successfully captured by Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/). Now, what I fully anticipate you all doing is taking the X profile link and searching that up right away. That, of course, is something that should be done. Remember that we said this treasure was hidden! The usage of the X.com domain was not regular until mid-2024. That means you also need to be searching twitter.com, as that is where most of the archiving took place.
Let's show you what we mean with the same @ChefReactions account.
As you can see, we only have 98 activity archives in the X.com domain, but have a staggering 1,276 archives in the twitter.com domain. This also means that this account was not always private, and that you now have a look at some of the activity that is no longer visible directly from the profile itself. These archives can show old profile photos, posts from the user, replies the user made on other posts, and even changes made in the bio of the profile. Let's look at a few of the results so you can see for yourself.
As our first educational blog, we hope that we've delivered. We really do mean it when we call our blog section our Knowledge Center. Our Knowledge Center and educational blog series are a direct result of our years of experience and expertise in open source intelligence and social media intelligence. If there is something something you want covered, make a request on our blog page.
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