Tweet to plain text & quote extractor

Paste the tweet URL above and this tool generates all three for you. The short version: every academic format wants the author's real name, the handle in brackets or parentheses, some or all of the tweet text, the platform name (X), the date posted, and the permalink. The order and punctuation differ between MLA 9, APA 7, and Chicago 17, which is why mixing them up is the most common citation mistake.

MLA 9 uses the entire tweet as the title, wrapped in quotation marks, and prefers a Day Month Year date with a timestamp. APA 7 truncates the tweet to the first 20 words, uses the author's last name plus first initial, and tags the entry with [Post]. Chicago 17 note style writes the author's full name normally, puts the truncated tweet in quotes, and uses Month Day, Year. We follow the current edition of each style guide.

Use X. The platform officially rebranded from Twitter in July 2023, and the major style guides (MLA, APA, Chicago) have all updated their guidance to use X for any tweet you're citing today, regardless of when the tweet was posted. If you're citing a tweet from before 2023 and your professor or editor prefers Twitter, that's also defensible, just be consistent across your bibliography.

Different styles want different lengths. MLA 9 lets you use the whole tweet if it's short; we cap at about 140 characters with an ellipsis for very long posts. APA 7 explicitly says to use the first 20 words. Chicago 17 doesn't have a strict rule, so we trim around 160 characters to keep the note readable. You can always edit the result by hand if your instructor wants the full text.

If the lookup fails, this tool tells you why: not found, removed, protected, or rate-limited. For citations of unavailable tweets, MLA and Chicago recommend noting that the tweet has been deleted in your in-text reference, while APA recommends citing it as a personal communication if you have a screenshot. The permalink in your citation should still point to the original URL.

We use UTC. X's syndication payload returns the tweet's posted-at time in UTC, and we format it as-is rather than guessing your local time. MLA 9 is the only style that asks for a timestamp at all, and its examples consistently use a single reference timezone for a bibliography, so UTC is a safe, citation-stable default. If your instructor wants the tweet's local time, you can edit the result by hand. The date itself won't shift unless the tweet was posted near midnight UTC.

No. The citations are yours: no watermark, no required attribution. Your tweet ID transits our server only long enough to forward the request to X; nothing is logged or persisted. The lookup goes through X's public syndication endpoint, the same one that powers embedded tweets on third-party sites.