Can you see who viewed your X (Twitter) profile?

No. None of X's help pages describes a list of the people who opened your profile, and nothing on your profile, in your notifications or in your analytics names a visitor. When Elon Musk introduced view counts in December 2022, he wrote that over 90% of Twitter users read but don't tweet, reply or like, "as those are public actions". Reading isn't one.

X names people only for what they do to you or your posts: following you, replying, reposting, quoting, and liking, which since June 2024 only you can see.

Twitter did show viewers once. Fleets, its posts that vanished after 24 hours, had a "Seen By" list of everyone who viewed each one. They launched in November 2020 and were gone on 3 August 2021. Spaces still do: unless you turn on anonymous listening, which is off by default, the people in a Space, and others, can see that you're listening.

Other networks made their own choices. LinkedIn shows who viewed your profile, except people browsing in private mode. TikTok shows profile visits only between two accounts that have both turned the setting on. Facebook's Help Center says it doesn't let people track who views their profile, and that third-party apps can't either.

Only how many times. X's page on view counts says the number under each post is the total number of times it has been viewed, and that anyone on X can see it, author or reader.

It counts more than you'd think:

• everyone logged in to X who sees the post, whether they follow you or not, wherever they see it
• the same person more than once: X's example is someone who reads a post on the web and then on their phone, which makes two views
• you: looking at your own post counts as a view

That's how a post can show 2,000 views on an account with 300 followers. Embeds don't add to the count, and community posts, X Circle posts and older posts show none at all.

View counts appeared on 22 December 2022. Before that, the number of times a post was seen was in its author's analytics and nowhere else.

X does count visits to your profile. Its analytics have a "Profile visits" figure, which X's help defined as the number of times users visited your profile page, and for each post a count of "User profile clicks", the clicks on your name, @username or photo. Neither figure comes with names. In June 2024, X moved its analytics page behind X Premium.

X's API has less. Its metrics documentation lists profile clicks per post as a private metric, readable only by the post's author and only for posts from the last 30 days. It has no profile-visits count and no field that identifies a viewer. A tool that gets its data from X gets a count, at most.

None of them works: X gives apps no list of viewers to show. They've been around since 2009, and what they were after was your account.

On the day TwitViewer appeared, a Norton post explained why it couldn't work: to see who clicks on a profile page, you have to be the one running the site. Only X has that data, and it doesn't hand it out.

If you connected one of these apps, revoke it in your X settings under "Apps and sessions", and change your password if you gave it to the app. What to check before you connect any app to X explains the permission screen.

You can't see who's looking, but you can see who stays. Your followers list shows who follows you today, and your notifications show new followers.

Who stopped following you is the part X leaves out: it sends no notification for an unfollow. That's what we do. We save your followers list, compare it at every check and DM you the @handle of anyone who's gone, with what happened to their account. How to see who unfollowed you goes through every way to find out, ours included.