TikToker reveals how your deleted social media posts can still be found by anyone

A TikToker has gone viral after revealing how people can find your deleted social media posts, such as photos and comments, using a free tool.

Content creator srhoe, who uses his platform to explore “ethical hacking,” has taken to TikTok to show how easy it is to recover fragments of your digital footprint that you thought you’d erased for good.

“This is why you gotta be careful posting stuff on the internet because whatever you delete can be found…and I found it,” srhoe told his 985,000 followers in a viral clip.

He then introduced the Wayback Machine, a website dedicated to preserving snapshots of URLs as they appeared at different points in time. While not many people have heard of it, the website has existed since 1996, and has continually archived publicly available websites throughout its history.

The site is useful in recovering information that would otherwise be lost as websites become inaccessible. However, as noted by the TikToker, it also complicates the ability of people to control the accessibility of their past online posts.

TikToker shows how to use Wayback Machine to see deleted posts

The content creator went on to demonstrate that by putting in a Twitter user’s URL with “status” at the end, such as his own (“http://twitter.com/5rhoe/status/”), it can retrieve numerous previous tweets, including those that may have been deleted in the past. “This feels so illegal to know,” he said.

However, the Wayback Machine doesn’t archive everything. It keeps a list of publicly available websites that it regularly crawls to preserve pages and relies on users to manually archive specific pages.

Moreover, it can’t save posts from restricted pages. So, if your Instagram or Twitter account is private, those pages won’t be archived unless they were previously public.

“Does it work on snap? (I might be cooked),” one viewer commented. “People just now finding out about the way back machine is the scariest thing,” another said.

“Nothing is truly deleted,” a third shared. “Once it’s on the internet, it’s stored & saved somewhere in some elite database forever.”