SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Background: I separated from my ex a couple of years ago. He shacked up with OW. We have two kids together who have special needs and require quite a bit of therapy. I received a weird apology from my ex yesterday about some of OW's activities. It turns out that OW was posting a bunch of malicious stuff about the team online questioning their methods and making thinly veiled accusations of child abuse. I think a bunch of it has now been taken down.

Is there a way for me to see what was posted/tweeted, even if it has been deleted or taken down by the poster? I think it was on facebook and/or twitter. I also have OW blocked on facebook because I didn't want to see her pop up.

From what I can gather the quick answer is usually, yes.

The process of digging it out may be beyond the scope of my very limited sleuthing abilities (and if I had time and faith I could be successful I would try to do so for you). Now if the deleter of these posts/tweets have taken the correct steps to clear themselves it may be beyond the scope of any realistic measure to bring them back. However, there is another online community that exists where people pass along information on how to do so. I can't link or reference outside sites so far as I'm aware but I think you can catch the drift of what I'm referring to, yes? I would also warn you that there's a certain "element" of unpredictable whenever you interact with others in such a community so I would advise information collection as your primary objective and be cautious in your approach at both that and anything else you may choose to pursue.

Also if you speak to an attorney I would ask about the possibility of calling someone to testify who may have witnessed these tweets and vouch for their existence in absence of absolute proof.

If I understood the situation correctly, the answer is NO.

As I understand, posts were made on several social platforms (FB? Twitter?) and were since removed/not visible to you.

So unless you have access to physical device these posts were made from, it is close to impossible to recover these. And I use "close to" because theoretically and practically it can be done if you have someone with access to FB or Twitter archives but I suspect you don't. Anyone who offers you to hack into these for a fee is just a scammer.

If the posts were public, you might want to check out Wayback Machine (just google it, first hit), but it is hightly unlikely this specific page was archived at the right moment.

There is a difference between what YOU can recover in an amateur investigation and what a computer forensics expert can recover. If related to litigation it is easier to recover as well. None of this just disappears and with a court order and the right technical know how I'm sure it could be recovered.

I don't think it is likely that you can recover it in the absence of those things though.

Thank you all for your help. I managed to get copies of screen shots of facebook posts from someone who had them. OW also has a blog (or possibly multiple blogs), so there might be something on there. I'm not sure about twitter now - the person who mentioned twitter to me only had copies of facebook posts, so she might have been mistaken about the type of social media they were on.

I do have a call in to my lawyer to find out what my options are to protect my kids from OW. I'm not sure yet if it will involve litigation.

Hello DarkHoleHeart,

If the posts were public,

IIRC you work in the tech industry, right?

I was under the impression that all FB posts were public (though said to be private) and recoverable unless certain steps were taken to delete them.

My knowledge of this is tertiary at best and I'm largely just repeating what I've heard from those that are (seemingly) wiser to the subject than me.

I had some "help" with stuff like this in the past and those helping me were able to recover FB posts but perhaps I misunderstood or was told incorrectly that they were both private and had been deleted.

[This message edited by MrMagnolia at 1:52 PM, May 17th (Thursday)]

I'm a software developer (but not in cyber security).

There are multiple ways to recover FB (or some other social media messages).

1. Directly from social media archives. Possible only for authorized employees and probably law enforcement (and such) in some serious cases (but I'm not sure about extent of that).

2. From device that was used to make the post, by using apps such as Dr. Fone. Limited capabilities. Digital forensics experts.

3. I would call it "accidental" - like Hawke did, somebody doing a screenshot and sharing with you.

4. If messages were not deleted, just made private, then you can get these by somehow getting access to target account (by hacking, social engineering etc.). Would not recommend that as it is illegal.

I guessed AP2's password (birthdate, what an idiot) and accessed his Gmail account, the conversations were deleted (WW knew that she is married to "computer guy", so she advised AP on what and where to delete), but I managed to get some interesting info from there nevertheless, that uncovered and resulted in more TT. They left a lot of traces despite being careful - cached chat messages, hotel reservations, hotel searches, location searches. She won't make such mistakes again (I haven't found SI at that time yet so was not trained to handle it correctly - "do not reveal your sources", etc).

FB messages aren't public unless you set it. I'm unaware of any methods to access private messages (except by above methods) and I'm sure that if there were any, FB is constantly patching it up (and introducing new bugs too - absolute security doesn't exist).

Thanks, DHH.

I have enough at the moment for an initial meeting with my lawyer. If we decide to pursue legal action (litigation with discovery, rather than a criminal investigation), then we would request all posts and possibly access to the devices used to create them - that's a legal matter rather than tech. My ex was a software developer, so he may be able to cover his and OW's tracks, but I really don't think he has much control over batshit crazy OW. I'll see where things go from here. I've been trolling OW blog. It's entertaining now how she struggled so hard a few years ago with the label of "homewrecker" (can you tell my heart bleeds for her? ).