Are your X (Twitter) bookmarks private?

X answers this on two separate help pages, and reading only the first is how the confusion starts.

• Your list: private. X's bookmarks page says "Bookmarks are private and are only viewable to you within your X account." No setting changes this.
• The count on a post: public. X's separate page on bookmark counts asks whether everyone can see them and answers "Yes, whether you're the author or reader, anyone on X can see Bookmark counts on posts."
• Who bookmarked it: nobody can see that. The same page: "We only show the total number of Bookmarks, not the specific accounts that have added a post to their Bookmarks." Asked directly whether you can see who bookmarked a post, X says no.

If you want a sense of how X itself classifies these, its developer API puts the bookmark count inside the same "public metrics" object as likes, reposts and impressions. The tally was designed to be public. The list was designed not to be.

One correction to X's own documentation: the bookmark-counts help page still says counts are "currently only available on iOS," which was true when the feature launched in 2023. Checked on 5 September 2026, the count renders on desktop web too. Treat that line as stale.

If your Bookmarks button turned into "History", nothing was taken away. In May 2026 X renamed the section on mobile and put four tabs inside it: Bookmarks, Likes, Videos and Articles. Your bookmarks are the first tab, still private.

There is a wrinkle worth understanding, though, because it changes what that private section actually contains. Bookmarks and Likes are things you chose to do. The Videos and Articles tabs fill up passively from what you watch and read. So "History" now holds a deliberate saved list and a record of your viewing behaviour under one roof. All of it is private to your account, but they are not the same kind of data, and if you were reassured by "bookmarks are private" it is worth knowing what else moved in next door.

X has never published a page on what happens to a bookmark when the post behind it goes away, so be sceptical of any article that lists six confident reasons. What can be said rests on one fact: a bookmark is a pointer to a live post, not a copy of it. When the post stops being reachable for you, so does the bookmark.

Working through what X does document about each event:

• The author deleted the post. Gone permanently. Nothing to point at.
• The author deleted their account. Gone permanently. X says that once an account is deleted it is no longer available in its systems and old posts are inaccessible.
• The author deactivated. This one comes back. X says deactivation makes a profile unviewable on x.com and both apps, and that deactivation lasts 30 days. If they return inside that window, so do the posts. This is the case worth waiting out before you conclude anything was lost.
• The author was suspended. Their posts sit behind a suspension notice rather than being served.
• The author went private, or blocked you. Protected posts are visible only to approved followers, and a block cuts your access. Not deleted, just not yours to read any more.

In every case except deactivation, waiting does not help. The only thing that would have helped is having kept a copy.

Search for a bookmark limit and you will find 800, 1,000 and 5,000 asserted with confidence. None of them comes from X.

• X publishes no save limit at all. The closest official statement runs the other way: its Premium help page says Premium gives you "an unlimited number of bookmarks and Bookmark folders which are always private." Note that this states the Premium case. X has never published a figure for free accounts either way.
• The 800 is real, but it is not what people think. It is a ceiling on how many of your most recent bookmarks a third-party app can pull through the API. It has nothing to do with how many you can save.
• Folders are a paid feature. X lists bookmark folders under Premium Basic, from $3 a month. When X announced folders it described organising bookmarks without mentioning the paywall, and the post picked up a Community Note saying so. The free bookmarks list is unaffected.

There is no export button anywhere in X. The documentation for the data archive lists what the download contains and bookmarks are not among them. That list is not exhaustive, so treat it as suggestive rather than proof, but there is no bookmarks file in the export, and a request to add one has sat unanswered on X's own developer forum since 2020. The sanctioned alternative is the API, which needs an approved developer account.

Which leaves syncing the list out of your own browser session. That is what Deepmark does, and to be clear about the bias: I built it. The extension reads your bookmarks list through the session you are already signed in with, then keeps a copy of each post along with the article it linked to, the transcript of any video, and the text inside images. Two consequences that matter here:

• A bookmark whose original post is deleted is still in your library and still readable, because the content was copied rather than linked.
• You can search by what the thing was about, not just the words in the post, which is the other half of the problem X's bookmarks have.

The honest limits: it is $7 a month billed yearly, it needs the Chrome extension to sync, and it is a copy under your account rather than a file you hold. If all you want is a plain file, the API route is free and Deepmark is overkill.