The State Department will delete X messages from before Trump returned to office

The State Department is removing all posts on its public accounts on the social media platform X that were posted before President Trump returned to office on January 20, 2025.

The messages will be archived internally but will no longer be visible to the public, the State Department confirmed to NPR. Employees were told that anyone wanting to see older messages will have to file a Freedom of Information Act request, according to a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. That would differ from the way the U.S. government typically handles archiving the public online footprint of previous administrations.

The move comes as the Trump administration has removed large amounts of information from government websites that conflict with the president’s views, including environmental and health data and references to women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The administration has also removed signs at national parks mentioning slavery and references to Trump’s impeachment and presidency in the National Portrait Gallery.

The White House also has one revisionist history account of the January 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol and replaced the government’s coronavirus resource sites with a page titled “Lablek: the true origins of Covid-19.”

Removing Foreign Affairs The directive will lead to the elimination of posts from Trump’s first term and those under then-presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

In response to NPR’s questions about the removals, an unnamed State Department spokesperson said the goal “is to limit confusion about U.S. government policy and speak with one voice to advance the goals and messages of the President, the Secretary, and the Administration.” It will preserve history while promoting the present.” The spokesperson said the department’s

The State Department did not respond to NPR’s specific questions about whether content will also be removed from other social media sites or whether there will be ways for the public to access archived messages without filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

“All archived content will be retained in accordance with the requirements of the Federal Record Act and Department policy,” the spokesperson said.

Some current and former State Department employees and academics worry this will make the historical record of the administration’s communications and actions more difficult to trace.

“For all the many challenges that social media has introduced into politics, it has also created a level of imperfect but certainly some degree of transparency,” said Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the role of social media in politics. “Even if [the X posts are] still accessible in some sort of archive, it still poses a bigger barrier in terms of accessing that information.”

In a similar but unrelated move, the CIA abruptly canceled the program this week World Factbooka widely used reference book that is considered an authoritative source of information about countries, their economies, their demography and more. The CIA’s announcement said the publication, which has been published since 1962 and first went online in 1997, was “doomed” and gave no further explanation for the decision.

Accounts of embassies, ambassadors and relevant agencies

The State Department directive applies to all active official Department X accounts, including accounts for U.S. embassies and missions, ambassadors, and department offices and programs, according to screenshots of internal guidelines seen by NPR. The department has used its posts on X and other social media sites for years to share everything from policy announcements and speeches from the secretary of state and ambassadors to fact sheets for travelers and images from around the world.

“These posts to be removed are not just press statements. They include our embassies’ Fourth of July livestreams, photos of COVID vaccine donations to other countries, holiday greetings, condolences, cultural programming, and the day-to-day record of diplomacy. They reveal who the U.S. engaged with, when, and how — often the only public record of those moments,” wrote Orna Blum, a senior foreign service official and public affairs specialist diplomacy who retired last year, in a LinkedIn message about the directive.

“Once removed, there will be no easy public, searchable access to this history. [The Freedom of Information Act] is slow, discretionary and often edited. It is a backstop and not a replacement for open archives,” Blum wrote.

Since Obama, the first president to use an official account on the social media site then called Twitter, left office in January 2017, transfer online accounts has been part of the transition process between governments. Some content is archived, but this data generally remains public.

Federal agency accounts, including @StateDept on The State Department also has public information available archived versions from its website under previous administrations dating back to President Bill Clinton.

Some high-profile accountsincluding those of the president, vice president, first lady and the White House, are treated differently. For example, the @POTUS handle on

Per State Department guidelines, the X removals do not apply to official accounts that are already inactive and marked as “archived,” such as the @SecPompeo account used by Trump’s first-term Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently faced similar questions and concerns about transparency and government data retention after his administration began delete messages created by his predecessor, Eric Adams, under the @NYCMayor handle on public archive maintained by the city.

While the State Department archives old messages, other agencies post extreme content

In itself, the removal of the State Department’s social media content is a small change that has nothing to do with larger overhauls of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy and the administration’s widespread changes to the federal bureaucracy.

But Trump’s second-term messaging strategy is defined by the idea that social media content rules and that governing is also achieved through content creation.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Labor Department and other federal government accounts have shared posts that contain white supremacist rhetoric and nods to conspiracy theories like QAnon. And Trump administration staffers often use X to spar with critics and post memes supporting the president.

On Friday, Trump faced unusual pushback from some fellow Republicans after sharing a video on his social media with false claims of election fraud — and a short clip of an unrelated video with a racist depiction of former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.

That post was removed after the White House initially defended it as an “internet meme.”