How it works

One keyword, the platforms' own search.

Who Posted What does not scrape and does not store posts. It builds the search you would otherwise type by hand on 22 platforms, with the date filter already set, and opens it for you.

Three steps

1. Type a keyword, a name, a phrase in quotes or a hashtag.
2. Pick a platform and a time: today, yesterday, the past week or all time.
3. The platform's own search opens in a new tab. If the platform wants you logged in, it asks you there.

What each button does

• X and Bluesky: the date operators since: and until:, newest first. Today and yesterday follow your own clock.
• Facebook: post search with Facebook's own date filter. Facebook applies it loosely and sometimes ignores it, so check the dates on what you find.
• Facebook, in depth: the original Who Posted What search, with every filter from graph.tips by sowdust. Search posts, people, photos, videos, pages, places, events or groups. Posts by day, month, year or date range, place, person or page, group, public only and newest first; people by city, school, employer or friends of someone; videos live, shows or feed; pages verified or by category; events by place and date. Get ID turns a Facebook link into the number these filters need. Facebook dropped the old "posts associated with" search, so that one is gone.
• LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube: their own filters for the past 24 hours and the past week, sorted by date where they allow it.
• Threads, TikTok and Pinterest: plain search. None of them offers a date filter in the link.
• Telegram, Mastodon and Instagram: through Google, limited to their public pages. Google only knows what it has crawled, so this finds less than the platform itself would.
• WhatsApp channels: through DuckDuckGo. WhatsApp tells search engines not to list channel pages and Google obeys, so it finds none; DuckDuckGo still has many. It matches a channel's name and description more than single posts, and has no date filter.
• Google News, Rumble: their own date filters. Truth Social, VK, Weibo, Tumblr, Twitch, Quora and Substack: their own search; Tumblr newest first. Weibo and Truth Social usually ask you to log in.

X and Bluesky, in depth

Their own search operators, filled in for you: one day or a date range, from an account, replies to an account, mentions, language, words to leave out, an exact phrase. On X also a minimum number of likes, only photos or videos, and hiding replies. Bluesky has no operators for those last ones, so its button leaves them out.

Find the first post

Pick X, Bluesky or Facebook and a window of dates. The finder asks the platform one question at a time: are there any posts with this keyword up to this day? You look and answer "posts found" or "nothing", and the window halves. A month takes about five steps, a year about nine. At the end it opens the one day the first post sits on. It finds the first post the platform still shows you: deleted posts, and posts the platform hides from search, stay out of reach.

Saved keywords and the morning mail

On Investigator and Newsroom every person saves up to 25 keywords. Every morning at 07:00 Amsterdam time one mail arrives with fresh links for each: yesterday on X, Bluesky and Facebook, the past 24 hours or the past week where a platform only has that, and a plain search elsewhere. One click in the mail turns it off.

The mail holds links, not posts. Most platforms do not let a server read their search results, so we never fetch or store what was posted; each link opens the search in your own browser.

What counts as a search

One keyword is one search, per day. Press as many buttons as you like for that keyword, on as many platforms as you like: it counts once. Without an account you get 2 a day; they come back at midnight UTC.

What we keep

For free searches we keep a fingerprint of the keyword for one day, enough to count it and nothing to read it back. Paid accounts keep a history of their own searches, so a keyword can be run again in one click; Reporter keeps it 30 days, Investigator a year, Newsroom as long as the account runs. Nobody else sees it.

Where it came from

Who Posted What started in 2017 as a Facebook keyword search for journalists, built on an idea by Henk van Ess with Daniel Endresz, Dan Nemec and Tormund Gerhardsen. Facebook closed that door in 2019. This version keeps the idea, finding the first post on a given day, and takes it to 22 platforms.