How to Cite a Tweet in APA 7 (X Posts, Threads, Profiles)

To cite a tweet in APA 7, give the author's name followed by their @handle in square brackets, the exact date of the post, the first 20 words of the post in italics, the label [Post], the site name X, and the URL. In the text, use the name and year: (Obama, 2024). The handle stays in the reference list only.

Most guides stop there. The harder part is everything around it: whether a tweet from 2017 is still a "Tweet," what counts as one of the 20 words, what to do with an emoji you cannot type, and how to cite a post that has since been deleted. This guide covers each one with a formatted example.

The official APA 7 rule for citing a tweet

Posts on X fall under Section 10.15 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), the social media section. APA's Common Reference Examples guide, last updated March 3, 2026, gives the current template under the heading "X Post."

Format:

Author, A. A. [@username]. (Year, Month Day). First 20 words of the post [Post]. X. URL

APA's own example:

Obama, B. [@BarackObama]. (2024, May 17). Today marks 70 years since the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing [Post]. X. https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1791540592238874953

Parenthetical citation: (Obama, 2024)

Narrative citation: Obama (2024)

Each element follows a rule:

• Author and handle. An individual's name is inverted with initials, as for any other author. The @handle follows in square brackets, with the @ kept. The brackets tell the reader where to find the account, so they never move into the in-text citation.
• Exact date. Year, month, and day of the post, in that order. A post has a timestamp, so "2024" alone is not enough.
• First 20 words as the title. The text of the post stands in for a title, cut off at the twentieth word. Count the words in APA's example: "outlawing" is word 20, and the entry stops there mid-sentence with no ellipsis.
• Italics, original capitalization. The 20-word title is italicized. Unlike most APA titles, it is not converted to sentence case. You copy the capitalization, spelling, and punctuation exactly as posted.
• [Post] and X. The bracketed label describes the format, and "X" is the site name. Neither is italicized.
• The URL. The direct link to that one post, which on X contains /status/ followed by a long number.

Tweet or post: what the rename changed

When Twitter became X in 2023, the reference changed in three places. The label went from [Tweet] to [Post], the site name went from Twitter to X, and the URL domain went from twitter.com to x.com. The author, date, and 20-word rules did not change.

You will still find the old pattern in library guides. The University of Queensland's APA 7 social media guide, for example, still cites a 2017 post with [Tweet], Twitter, and a twitter.com link. APA's current example uses the new terms, and so does Davenport University's APA social media guide, which cites a post from May 2020, before the rename, as [Post] on X with an x.com URL. That settles the most common question: the post's age does not matter. Use [Post] and X for any post you cite now, because that is the name and address a reader will use to find it.

Worked examples

The examples below use real posts where a style authority has already published the reference, and clearly generic placeholders everywhere else. Placeholder URLs are shown as https://x.com/username/status/[post ID]: replace them with the full address of the post you are citing.

1. A post by an individual

This is APA's own case. The person's real name is in the profile, so it goes first, inverted, with the handle after it.

Obama, B. [@BarackObama]. (2024, May 17). Today marks 70 years since the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing [Post]. X. https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1791540592238874953

In-text: (Obama, 2024) or Obama (2024).

If you are unsure whether the profile name is the person's legal name, use it as it appears on the profile. That is the name a reader will see when they open your link.

2. A post by an organization

A group author is written out in full, with no inversion and no period between the name and the handle. Davenport's guide uses this post from the Library of Michigan:

Library of Michigan [@LibraryofMich]. (2020, May 4). A shout-out to Michigan native and the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones. #maythe4thbewithyou [Thumb-nail with link attached][Post]. X. https://x.com/LibraryofMich/status/1257294527657914370

In-text: (Library of Michigan, 2020) or Library of Michigan (2020).

Two details matter here. The hashtag stays in the title, because it is part of the post's text. And the bracketed note "[Thumb-nail with link attached]" tells the reader the post carried a link preview. Our guide to citing a group author in APA 7 covers abbreviations such as (National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA], 2024), which work the same way for agency accounts.

3. An account with no real name

Many accounts show only a screen name. James Cook University Library's APA social media guide gives the rule: when the full name is not listed, use the screen name in the author position, without square brackets.

@username. (2025, March 2). First 20 words of the post [Post]. X. https://x.com/username/status/[post ID]

In-text: (@username, 2025).

Do not try to work out who is behind an anonymous account and put their name in. If the person has not published under their name, the reader cannot find the post by it either.

4. A post with an image, video, or link attached

Add a bracketed description of the attachment after the title and before [Post]. The common forms are [Image attached], [Video attached], and [Thumbnail with link attached].

Author, A. A. [@username]. (2025, June 9). First 20 words of the post [Image attached] [Post]. X. https://x.com/username/status/[post ID]

Describe what is attached, not what the image shows. If the image itself is what you are analysing, such as a chart or a political cartoon, the post is still your source, and the reference stays the same. Our guide on citing an image in APA 7 covers the separate case of an image you reproduce in your paper as a figure.

5. A post with no text at all

Some posts are only a photo or a video. With no words to copy, APA's rule for untitled works applies: write a short description of the post in square brackets in the title position, and do not italicize it.

Author, A. A. [@username]. (2025, January 14). [Photograph of a flooded city street at night] [Post]. X. https://x.com/username/status/[post ID]

Keep the description factual and short, a few words a reader can match against the post when they open the link.

6. A post with hashtags, links, and emojis

The 20-word title keeps everything the author typed. A hashtag, a URL, and an emoji each count as one word. Do not drop them to make room for more of the sentence.

For emojis, JCU's guide advises reproducing the emoji itself where your word processor allows it. Where it does not, use the emoji's official short name from the Unicode emoji chart in square brackets, such as [umbrella with rain drops]. Record the emoji the author used, even when it was clearly picked for its look rather than its meaning.

JCU also notes that line breaks in a post are ignored in the reference. A post written as three short lines becomes one continuous title.

7. A reply to another post

A reply has its own author, date, and URL, so it gets its own reference in the same format. Cite the reply's author, not the account being replied to, and use the URL of the reply itself.

Author, A. A. [@username]. (2025, April 22). First 20 words of the reply [Post]. X. https://x.com/username/status/[post ID]

APA's published examples do not include a separate label for replies, and none of the guides checked for this article add one. The [Post] label is the defensible choice. If the exchange matters to your point, say so in your sentence: "Replying to the agency, Author (2025) argued that..."

8. A quote post

A quote post shows someone else's post inside a new one. Cite the post whose words you use. If you are discussing the new comment, cite the quote post. If you are quoting the embedded original, open it and cite it directly with its own author, date, and URL. You can cite both in one sentence when you discuss the exchange: (Author, 2025; Other Author, 2025).

9. An X profile

Sometimes you cite an account rather than a single post, for example to show that an organization runs an official presence on the platform. The profile has no single publication date, so you use n.d. and add a retrieval date, because the page changes constantly. Davenport's guide gives this example:

APA Style [@APA_Style]. (n.d.). Posts [X profile]. X. Retrieved November 8, 2023, from https://x.com/APA_Style

In-text: (APA Style, n.d.).

"Posts" is the name of the tab a profile opens on. If you are citing a different tab, use its name in place of "Posts." For other sources that lack a date, our guide on citing a source with no date in APA 7 explains the n.d. rule in full.

Special cases

The worked examples cover single posts. The cases below come up when a post is part of something larger, or when it is no longer where you found it.

A thread of several posts

A thread is a chain of separate posts, each with its own URL. Cite the specific post that holds the words you quote or paraphrase. If you draw on the thread as a whole, cite the first post and say in your sentence that it opens a thread. If you quote from three posts in the thread, three references are the accurate choice, since a reader following a single link would land on only one of them.

A repost

A repost (the old retweet) adds no content of its own. Cite the original post by its original author. The account that reposted it is not the author, and the repost's timestamp is not the date of the words.

A deleted or suspended post

If the post is gone, a reader following your URL hits an error page. Check whether the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has a saved copy. If it does, cite the post as normal but use the archived URL, so the reader can see what you saw.

If no archived copy exists, the post cannot be recovered. If you know it from a news report that quoted it, cite the news article as a secondary source, following Section 8.6 of the manual: name the original in your sentence, cite the article you read, and put only the article in the reference list. Screenshots in your own files are not retrievable by a reader, so they do not count as a source location.

A post from a protected account

Posts from a protected account are visible only to approved followers. A reader cannot retrieve them, so APA treats them as personal communications (Section 8.9). They are cited in the text only, never in the reference list: (A. Author, personal communication, March 2, 2025).

Two posts by the same author in the same year

Add lowercase letters after the year: (Obama, 2024a) and (Obama, 2024b). In the reference list, posts with the same author and year are put in date order, with the letters assigned in that order. Our guide to APA reference list order covers how these sit among the author's other works.

A post that links to an article

Seneca Polytechnic's APA social media guide gives the practical rule: if a post links to an article and the article is what you used, cite the article. Cite the post only when the post itself is your evidence, such as a public figure's announcement or the wording of an official account.

A post in another language

Copy the first 20 words in the original language, exactly as posted. APA's general rule for non-English titles lets you add an English translation in square brackets after the title, which helps a reader who does not read the language. Keep the original in all cases.

Quoting a tweet in your paper

A post has no page numbers, and a short one needs no location at all. Put the quotation in double quotation marks and give the citation: Obama (2024) wrote that the decision marked "70 years since the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision."

Quote the post exactly, including misspellings and nonstandard capitalization. APA's quotation rules let you insert [sic] after an error to mark it as the original author's. On a platform where casual spelling is normal, mark only errors that could be mistaken for yours.

Paid X accounts can post far beyond the old character limit. If a quotation runs to 40 words or more, set it as a block quotation (Section 8.27), indented, without quotation marks, with the citation after the final punctuation.

For a long post that you only partly quote, the 20-word rule still governs the reference. The reference title is always the first 20 words, even if the passage you quote comes from the end.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Putting the handle in the in-text citation. Writing (@BarackObama, 2024) is the wrong form when the author has a real name. The handle belongs in the reference list. The in-text citation uses the name, which is what the reader looks up alphabetically. The only exception is an account with no real name, where the screen name is the author.
• Using the old [Tweet] and Twitter labels. These come from templates written before 2023. Use [Post] and X, and update twitter.com links to x.com.
• Converting the title to sentence case. Most APA titles are sentence case, so the habit is strong. Social media titles are copied as written. If the author typed in all capitals, the reference does too.
• Adding an ellipsis at word 20. APA's example stops at "outlawing" with nothing after it. The cut-off is part of the format.
• Leaving out the day. A post has an exact date. (2024) alone is a sign the entry was adapted from a book template.
• Citing a profile URL for a single post. The URL must point to the post, with /status/ in it. A link to the account's main page sends the reader scrolling through years of posts.
• Citing the repost instead of the original. The person who reposted did not write the words.
• Copying a reference from a social share button or a browser extension without checking. These tools often produce a webpage-style reference with no handle and no [Post] label. Compare the output against APA's template above before you paste it.

Quick-reference table