X History Tab: Where It Is, What It Keeps, How to Clear It

Open the X app on an iPhone, tap your profile picture, and the item in the side menu that used to say Bookmarks now says History. X, the app that used to be Twitter, renamed it in May 2026. Your saves did not move. The menu item did, and it now has three neighbors it never had before.

X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, announced it on May 12, 2026. The post said the new tab would hold “Bookmarks, Long Videos, Articles and Likes.” It rolled out to iOS first. Four months on, Android and the web still show a plain Bookmarks item for most people. So many of the people reading about History cannot find it. The rest found it by accident and want to know what the Videos tab is doing there.

This post covers the tab itself. Where it lives on each platform, and what each of the four tabs records. Which of them you filled on purpose and which filled themselves. What you can clear, and who can see it. Then the part nobody on the launch coverage mentioned, which is what the rename says about who History is for.

What X changed, and when

For years the X app had a Bookmarks item in the side menu. It opened one list, newest first, of every post you had tapped the bookmark icon on. On May 12, 2026, Nikita Bier, who runs product at X, posted that a new History tab was rolling out on iOS to keep your favorite content in one place. The Bookmarks item became History, and the single list became four tabs.

TechCrunch’s write-up the next day put the split plainly. Bookmarks and Likes are intentional saves. Videos and Articles are populated from what you watch and read. TechCrunch’s report also said the section stays private to you, which matters more for the two new tabs than for the two old ones, and there is a section on that below.

Two things about the timing catch people out. The Likes tab had already left profiles in early May, a week or so before History arrived, so there was a window where likes were not visible anywhere in the app. PiunikaWeb tracked that gap from May 3, and the answer turned out to be that Likes was on its way into History. And the rollout was staggered, which is why a friend on an iPhone can have it while you do not, and why the web has mostly not changed.

Undocumented by X

As of September 22, 2026, X’s own help center article on Bookmarks does not mention History. It still says to tap Bookmarks from the profile menu, still describes a single timeline, and still explains the remove-all option in that timeline’s menu. The feature shipped, the documentation did not. That is worth knowing before you go looking for an official answer to any question below, because there is not one yet.

Where you are seeing this

The tab lives in a different place on each platform, and on two of them it does not exist yet.

If you are on Android or the web and the menu says Bookmarks, you have not been moved over. It is not a setting you can flip and it is not a bug. It is the same list under the old name, and everything in the Bookmarks section below applies to you unchanged. Why the History tab is not showing goes through each platform and the iPhone checks worth doing. The full walkthrough of where bookmarks sit on every device is the guide for that, and it also covers the search box, which Android still does not have.

If you are on iOS and cannot see History at all, check that the app is up to date, then check which account you are signed into. Both are covered in the guide above, and the second one resolves more empty-list panics than anything else on this site.

The four tabs, and which ones you filled yourself

This is the part the launch coverage skated over, so it is worth going tab by tab.

Bookmarks: Every post you tapped the bookmark icon on, newest first. This is the old list, untouched. If you pay for Premium and set up bookmark folders, the accounts published since the launch say they are still reached through this tab, and how folders work on X has not changed. The same accounts say the keyword search box is still there on iOS.

Likes: Every post you tapped the heart on. Until May this had its own tab on your profile. Now it lives here, and X has not given it another home. A like still notifies the author and still shows up in the post’s public like count, which is the difference that matters most between these two tabs, and X bookmarks vs likes goes through it properly.

Videos: Long videos you watched on X. You did not save any of them. X logged them. Bier’s post said “Long Videos”, and reporting since has read that as longer uploads rather than every clip that autoplayed in your feed, but X has not said where the line sits. What people noticed first, in the help threads that followed the launch, was entries for videos they had never saved.

Articles: Articles you opened on X. That most likely means X’s own long-form Articles format, the one paying accounts can publish, rather than links out to other sites, though X has not spelled it out. Same rule as Videos. It fills without you.

So two of the four tabs are your list, and two are X’s record of your attention, filed next to it under one label. That is the design, not a side effect. Bier’s post says the timeline moves fast and History is meant to be the place you go back to, to finish watching or reading. A tab that fills itself is a tab you will always find something in.

No bookmark count

Nothing in the announcement or on X’s help page adds a count of how many bookmarks you have. There never was one. If you have been saving for years and want to know whether you are near X’s bookmark limit, the tab will not tell you, and the limit itself is a limit on what the app and API will show you, not on what X stores.

What History keeps, and what it does not

Every tab in History is a list of pointers. When you bookmark a post, X records that your account flagged that post ID. When you watch a long video, X records that you watched that post ID. Nothing about the post itself is copied anywhere on your behalf. Open the tab a year later and every entry is fetched live from the original post.

That has three consequences, and they are the same three that applied to the old Bookmarks list.

• A deleted post goes blank in every tab it was in. The author deletes it, deactivates, goes private, or gets suspended, and your bookmark, your like and your watch record all point at nothing. Why X bookmarks vanish works through the six causes in order, and since the rename it carries a note near the top for anyone whose Bookmarks tab is now called History, because “my bookmarks are gone” and “my Bookmarks tab is gone” are different problems with the same first symptom.
• You cannot export any of it from inside X. There is no download button in History. X’s account data archive covers things you did, such as posting and liking. No report so far has found the Videos or Articles logs in it, which fits, because they are a record of things you viewed rather than things you did.
• It only exists on X’s servers. The Bookmarks tab is not backed up to your phone. If X changes its mind about the feature, as it has just done about the name and about the Likes tab, the list changes with it.

This is where a copy of your own earns its keep. ContextBolt is a free Chrome extension we build. On desktop, it captures each X bookmark the moment you tap the bookmark icon, with the post’s text rather than a pointer to it, so it still reads after the author deletes the post, and tags it by topic. Bookmarks you save on your phone come across too, because they sync to your account, and the extension picks them up the next time you open x.com/i/bookmarks in Chrome. Search covers those AI topic tags as well as the text, so “pricing” finds a post tagged pricing even when it only said “we charge $9”, which the keyword box in History cannot do. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month, removes the cap, and adds cloud sync and an MCP endpoint, which is where semantic search over your saves lives for Claude and other agents.

How to clear it

The question that comes up first, on Reddit’s r/twitterhelp among other places, is how to delete the video and photo history in the new tab. The honest answer is in two halves, because the four tabs do not all work the same way.

Bookmarks and Likes clear the way they always did. To remove one bookmark, open the post from the tab, tap the share icon, and choose Remove post from Bookmarks. To remove all of them, X’s help page still describes a more icon at the top of the Bookmarks timeline with a remove-all option. To remove a like, unlike the post. There is no remove-all for likes, so a long history of hearts is a long afternoon.

Videos and Articles have no documented clear control inside the tab. X has not described a swipe-to-remove on an entry or a menu at the top of either tab, and the help center has nothing on it. What third-party guides point to is an older setting, usually found under Settings and privacy, then Privacy and safety, then Personalization and data, labeled Clear video viewing history. X moves these settings around, so searching Settings for “viewing history” is faster than following any path, including that one. Whether that control empties the Videos tab is something X has not said, and the tab keeps filling from the next video you watch either way. No published guide names an equivalent control for Articles.

If clearing matters to you because someone else uses your phone, the practical answer is not in History at all. Sign out of X on that device, or use a separate account for the viewing you would rather not have filed. The tab is private to your account, and a shared account is the one case where “private to you” does not help.

Can anyone see your History tab?

No. TechCrunch’s launch report says the History section is private to you. Nobody can open your profile and browse what you bookmarked, liked, watched or read. What was visible before is still visible. The author of a post you like still gets the notification with your name on it, and every post still carries a public like count and bookmark count. Is your X History private goes tab by tab through who can see each list and what X itself does with them, and the X bookmark privacy guide covers the bookmark half in full.

What the rename is actually for

Here is the opinion, and it is the reason this post exists rather than a one-line note on the finder guide.

History is not a feature for you. It is a return-visit hook. Bier’s own framing says as much. The timeline moves fast, so X wants a place you come back to. A Bookmarks list only works as that place if you bookmarked something, and most people save a handful of posts a month. A tab that logs what you watched is never empty, so there is always a reason to open it, and there is always a half-finished video to finish.

That is a reasonable product decision for X. It is a worse deal for the list you built. Your deliberate saves, the posts you chose to keep, now share one label and one screen with an automatic log of your attention. The word Bookmarks meant “things I picked.” The word History means “things that happened.” The rename tells you which of those X thinks the tab is.

If the point of bookmarking was to keep a small, chosen set of things you wanted back, the fix is to keep that set somewhere the platform does not curate for you. That is the job ContextBolt does. It captures X bookmarks as you save them, with the text, and keeps them next to your Reddit and LinkedIn saves and any web page you clip. X can rename the tab again next spring. The copy does not care what the tab is called.

The honest take

The History tab is fine. Nothing was lost, the Bookmarks list is one tap further than it was, and if you are on Android or the web you have not even noticed. If you like having your watched videos in a list, it is a small gift.

But read what the four tabs are. Two are yours and two are X’s, and the two that are X’s will always be fuller than the two that are yours. The list you curated is now a quarter of a screen named after the thing you did not curate. Keep saving to X, because a bookmark there is still the fastest way to flag a post. Just do not let it be the only place the post lives.