Why it exists
Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan. Before running statewide, he removed thousands of posts from his X account. His campaign has said he deleted everything he posted before July 2023 so it couldn’t be “taken out of context.”
Those posts were public statements by a public figure, written over many years while he ran for governor, led Detroit’s health department, and commented on national politics. Voters, reporters and anyone else deciding what they think of him should be able to read them. This archive brings them back, in his own words, and makes them easy to search, browse, share and check.
The goal is documentation, not spin. Posts are shown as he wrote them, with nothing rewritten or cut. You can read the full record, including the posts he kept, and make up your own mind.
What you’ll find here
- All posts: every recovered post, searchable by word, year and type, with a filter for posts deleted from X.
- Deleted posts: what’s gone from X, when it went, and the news coverage of the deletions.
- Trends: how his focus changed over time, where his positions shifted, and the concerns reporters have raised.
- Themes: the topics and phrases he returns to most, and his most popular posts.
- A page for every post, with a link to the Wayback Machine capture it came from and to its original X address.
How it was built
- Saved copies. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine saved copies of many of his posts and profile pages over the years. Every post here was rebuilt from one of those copies. Most came from the saved page itself, some from saved copies of X’s embed data.
- Posts still on X. Some recent posts were saved only as blank pages that need JavaScript. For those that are still on his account, the text comes from X’s public embed data.
- Images. Attached images are stored on this site so they don’t disappear.
- Deletion checks. Every post is checked against X’s public embed service. A post X reports as missing is marked Deleted. The check runs again every day, so new deletions show up.
- Daily updates. New Wayback captures of his account are collected every day and added here.
Limits, honestly
- The archive only has posts the Wayback Machine happened to save. Posts it never saved can’t be recovered, which is why some years, like 2024, have very few.
- Likes, reposts and replies are as counted on the day each copy was saved, not today.
- “Deleted” means X no longer shows the post. In rare cases that can happen for other reasons, such as a reply to an account that no longer exists.
- Each post links to the capture it came from, so you can check any post against its source.