Preserving the US State Department’s Data

In February 2026, the US State Department announced it would delete every post on its official X accounts made before Trump returned to office on January 20, 2025. The posts would be “archived internally.” But to see them, the public would have to file a FOIA request.

We didn’t think that was good enough - so we backed them up.

The State Department X Archive preserves approximately 30,000 tweets from @StateDept, along with video and phone media, from January 2008 to January 2025 - 17 years of day-to-day US diplomacy.

Orna Blum, a long-serving senior foreign service officer and public diplomacy specialist who retired last year, wrote in a LinkedIn post about the directive:

"These posts to be removed are not just press statements. They include our embassies' July 4 livestreams, photos of COVID vaccine donations to other nations, holiday greetings, condolences, cultural programming, and the day-to-day record of diplomacy. They show who the U.S. engaged with, when, and how—often the only public record of those moments."

The archive can be browsed by year and month. Every month’s data is downloadable and every Tweet has its own permalink.

Browse the archive here.

View the source code here.

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