Search and discovery

Search and the people-listing commands all reach into the GraphQL surface, and as of July 2026 X answers every one of them only for your own session. A guest token is not enough. This guide covers finding tweets and finding accounts, and assumes you have run x auth import once.

Search

x search "from:nasa filter:images"

The query is X's own search syntax: from:, to:, #hashtag, filter:, since:/until:, quoted phrases, and the rest. Choose what kind of results you want with --product:

x search "webb telescope" --product Top
x search "webb telescope" --product Latest   # default
x search "webb telescope" --product People   # accounts, not tweets
x search "webb telescope" --product Photos
x search "webb telescope" --product Videos

Search is denied to guest tokens outright: under --guest the request comes back not-found however well-formed it is. Run it under your session (see your account).

Counts

x counts "webb telescope"

x counts buckets matching tweets per day, client-side, and prints a count for each day. --product takes Top or Latest. It is a quick way to see when a topic spiked without paging every tweet.

Followers and following

x followers nasa          # accounts following a user
x following nasa          # accounts a user follows

Both need your session. They page through the social graph and return one account per row, so they shape and pipe like any other list:

x following nasa --fields username,name -o csv

Likers, retweeters, and likes

x likers <ref>            # accounts that liked a tweet
x retweeters <ref>        # accounts that retweeted a tweet
x likes nasa              # tweets a user has liked

likers and retweeters take a tweet ref and return accounts. likes takes a user and returns the tweets they liked. All three need a session.

To chain these into one another, hop by hop, from a starting tweet or account rather than running them one at a time, see graph discovery.

Lists

x list <list-id>          # tweets in an X List

x list reads the timeline of a public X List by its numeric id. It needs your session, even though the list is public.

Session versus guest

A guest token buys five operations, and none of them are on this page: the profile read by handle or by id, the deeper timeline walk, the tweet read, and an audio Space. Measured on 2026-07-28, every other GraphQL call came back 404 with an empty body under --guest, which is how X says no to a credential it does not accept. So --guest is worth nothing here.

Your own session (x auth import) is what these need. When a command needs more than you have enabled, x exits with code 4 and tells you which tier to add.