How to make your X (Twitter) account private

1. 1

   Open Settings and privacy

   In the iPhone or Android app, tap your profile photo at the top (some Android phones show a menu icon instead), then Settings and privacy. On x.com, click More in the left menu, then Settings and privacy.

2. 2

   Go to Privacy and safety, then Audience and tagging

   That's where X's help puts the setting. X's app text also calls the page "Audience, media and tagging", so look for either name.

3. 3

   Turn on Protect your posts

   Drag the slider on iPhone, or tick the box on Android and the web. X asks "Protect your posts?" and explains: "This will make them visible only to your X followers." Confirm, and a lock icon appears next to your name.

If you're in a Community, the same dialog warns that "Communities are public, so protecting your account will hide your previous posts", and that you won't be able to post in the Community until your account is public again.

To go public, turn the same setting off, but approve the follow requests you want to keep first. X's help says: "Any requests left pending will not be accepted automatically. If left pending, those accounts will need to follow you again." Everything you posted while protected goes public too: "Unprotecting your posts will cause any previously protected posts to be made public."

X's help speaks only of posts: "Your posts, including permanent links to your posts, will only be visible to your followers." The rest of your profile stays public. On 11 October 2026, without signing in, we opened the "Pierre Delecto" account, which Senator Mitt Romney confirmed in October 2019 was his and which went private when the press found it. x.com showed its name, its join date (July 2011), its post count, its following and follower counts and a lock icon, then "These posts are protected". A second protected account we opened showed its bio as well.

It used to hide more. In 2010 the setting was called "Protect my Updates", and Twitter's help said: "Your Profile and Tweets will only be visible to users you've approved". Whether someone who doesn't follow you can open your Following and Followers lists, X's help pages don't say; signed out, x.com asks everyone to log in for those lists, public account or not.

Other things change too:

• Your followers can't repost or quote your posts: "Your followers will not be able to use the repost icon to repost or repost with comment." You can still repost and quote other people, and only your followers see it.
• Your replies to someone who doesn't follow you go unseen by them: "Replies you send to an account that isn't following you will not be seen by that account".
• Media links aren't protected: "Anyone with the link will be able to view the content." The same goes for the t.co links in your posts.
• Posts you made before you protected them can linger. Someone who already had one in their Home timeline may still see it, though they "won't be able to interact with the post or see its details."
• Your followers can still "capture images of your posts and share them", X reminds you.
• You can't start a Space, though you can join and speak in other people's, and you can't join a Community: "To join a Community, you must have a public account."

Replies are where people get it wrong. In a survey of 336 Twitter users recruited online in July 2021 and published in 2023, only 31% knew that a public account's reply to a protected account's tweet is publicly visible. 66% thought only the protected account's followers could see it.

In the app, tap your profile icon at the top, then Follower requests, and tap the checkmark to approve someone or the X to deny them. On x.com, click More, then Follower requests at the top of the menu, then Accept or Decline. X's help on follower requests gives three reasons you might not see them:

• Your posts are public. "People with public posts do not have the option to approve followers."
• You have none. "When there are zero requests, the notification message disappears completely from your profile."
• The person cancelled. If X emailed you about a request you can't find, "it's likely that the person decided to cancel the request after sending it."

On the other side, Follow on a protected account sends a request, and the button then reads Pending. Tap it and X asks "Discard follow request?", adding that the person "will no longer see it." If they've blocked you, the request can't be sent: X's app says "You have been blocked from following this user at their request." How to know if someone blocked you covers the rest.

X's help pages don't say whether you're told when a request is accepted or declined, whether requests expire, or how many you can have waiting. Neither the help nor the text of X's web app mentions a list of the requests you've sent. The only place X's help points to is that person's profile, where the Follow button reads Pending.

No. Only approved followers can, and X's Developer Policy tells every app: "You must respect the protected and blocked status of all X Content." Sites that promise to unlock protected tweets are a different thing. One heavily promoted site we found in October 2026 played a fake unlocking animation, then showed a "Verification Required" box that asked visitors to install an unrelated app first. We won't link it.

Handing your password to outside sites has leaked protected posts since 2007. In May 2007, protected updates turned up on Twittervision, a site built on Twitter's API. Twitter explained that "Some Twitter users willingly provided their usernames and passwords" to it, and that it "was not checking to see if any of these folks had marked their updates as 'protected.'" Its advice still holds: "refrain from supplying your Twitter username and password to other people, sites, or services." Sites offering to show who viewed your profile promise just as much: in 2018 Malwarebytes wrote that they "only serve to annoy, spam ads, or offer surveys" (who viewed my X profile).

Circle was never a feature of private accounts, whatever X's help page says today. Anyone, public accounts included, could keep one list of up to 150 people and send any tweet to them alone. Twitter's own help said in 2022: "Anyone on Twitter can be added to a Circle, even if they don't follow someone." Twitter started testing it on 3 May 2022 and opened it to everyone on 30 August 2022. X announced its end in September 2023, and since 31 October 2023 nobody can post to a Circle.

There's no official figure, and the studies used different methods:

• 8.4% in 2009: 5.27 million of the 62.6 million accounts created before September 2009, in Carnegie Mellon's crawl.
• About 5% in January 2013, from a random sample of 0.1% of all accounts, and up to 15% of people who joined before December 2007 (a 2014 study from Northeastern and Brown).
• 13% of US adult Twitter users at the end of 2018, among those who shared their handle with the Pew Research Center (published in 2019).
• 11% in 2021. Pew checked the accounts of US adults who shared their handle: 89% were public, including 83% of those who had said their account was private or weren't sure.

People switch back and forth, too. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh watched about 107,000 protected accounts for three months in 2020: over 40% changed the setting at least once, and around 16% more than five times.

We can't read a private account's followers, so we can't track yours while it's protected: setup stops at "Your X account is private" until you make it public and press "Check again". A paid plan whose account turns private gets a DM and seven days to go public again. After that we end the plan and refund the days paid since we first found it private. When you go public again, checks resume on a plan that covers your account, and the followers we had saved are still there.

Your followers' settings don't matter. A private follower is tracked like any other, and if one leaves, we DM you their name. Going private isn't an unfollow, and we don't count it as one. We never read your posts or anyone else's: is an unfollow tracker safe to connect?