TWEET-MACHINE: A Twitter OSINT Tool to Recover Deleted Tweets

TWEET-MACHINE is an open-source Twitter OSINT tool that recovers deleted tweets and replies from any account, including suspended ones. Researchers, journalists, and pentesters use it to pull historical Twitter data that has already vanished from the platform. This guide covers installation, usage, output files, and what you need to know before running it on an active investigation.

Tip: TWEET-MACHINE's recovery depends on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. High-profile or frequently crawled accounts tend to have much better coverage than low-activity ones.

What TWEET-MACHINE Actually Does

Twitter gives you no official way to retrieve deleted content. Once a tweet is gone, it’s gone from the platform. TWEET-MACHINE works around this by querying web archives to find cached versions of tweets before deletion.

It also handles suspended accounts. When Twitter bans an account, all its tweets disappear from the platform instantly. If that content was archived before the suspension, TWEET-MACHINE can still retrieve it. That’s the scenario that makes this tool genuinely useful in real investigations.

The tool is written in Bash and runs on Linux. There’s no Python environment to set up and no complex dependencies. If you’re comfortable with a Linux shell, you’ll have it running in minutes.

Key Features of This Twitter OSINT Tool

The Wayback archive links are the critical gotcha here. A direct tweet URL like twitter.com/username/status/12345 returns a 404 if the tweet is deleted. The archive link is your fallback. Always check the .webarchive file when the main links won’t load.

How to Install TWEET-MACHINE on Kali Linux

Clone the repository and make the script executable:

git clone https://github.com/0xcyberpj/tweet-machine.git && cd tweet-machine
chmod +x tweetmachine.sh

That’s the full setup. No pip install, no virtual environments, no additional packages. The script handles the rest when you run it.

Running TWEET-MACHINE: Commands and Flags

Pass a Twitter username with the -u flag. Use -d to specify an output directory. Skip -d entirely and the output files land in your current working directory.

./tweetmachine.sh -u <username> -d <directory>

Practical examples:

# Save output to /tmp
./tweetmachine.sh -u cyberpj1 -d /tmp

# Save output to the current directory
./tweetmachine.sh -u cyberpj1

Replace cyberpj1 with the target Twitter handle. TWEET-MACHINE queries the archives and builds three output files automatically.

Understanding the Three Output Files

Each run produces three files named after the target username:

You can pipe the timeline file through sort or grep to filter by date range or keyword during analysis. That’s useful when you’re working with accounts that have thousands of archived tweets.

For suspended accounts specifically, the .webarchive file is what you need most. Direct Twitter links for a suspended user return a dead page. The Wayback URLs load the archived content directly, bypassing Twitter’s platform entirely.

Real-World OSINT Scenario

Consider a Twitter account, madangowri03, that gets suspended overnight. Every tweet disappears from Twitter immediately. TWEET-MACHINE retrieves every tweet and reply that account ever posted, along with Wayback backup links for each one.

This is the scenario OSINT investigators hit regularly. An account goes down right before or after a newsworthy event. TWEET-MACHINE gives you a documented record of what was posted before the account was removed.

Journalists use this for source verification before publication. Pentesters use it to map the social footprint of a target organization. Threat intelligence analysts use it to track deleted disinformation campaigns before the evidence disappears.

Legal and Ethical Boundaries

TWEET-MACHINE retrieves publicly archived data, not private messages or protected tweets. Still, data collection laws vary by jurisdiction. Twitter’s Developer Agreement and Policy also governs how scraped or archived Twitter data can be used, stored, and shared.

Use this tool only for legitimate research, journalism, or authorized security work. Don’t use it to harass individuals, build profiles for surveillance, or get around platform bans for prohibited activity.

TWEET-MACHINE was developed by P4UL and R4VANAN and is available on GitHub as an open-source project.

Keep it in your OSINT toolkit. Test it on a known public account first so you understand how the three output files work before running it on a live investigation target.