What t= and s= mean in an X (Twitter) share URL

Anatomy of an X share URL

Pick any tweet, tap Share → Copy Link, and you get something like:

https://x.com/handle/status/1234567890123456789?t=AbCdEf-12345_xyz&s=46

The path — /handle/status/<tweet-id> — is the only part the server cares about. Open the URL with the path alone and you get the same tweet; the ?t=…&s=… tail exists purely for X's attribution funnel.

• /handle/ — the account that posted the tweet (or any retweeter).
• /status/<tweet-id> — the unique tweet identifier; the only part X needs to render the page.
• ?t=<token> — a per-device session token (more below).
• &s=<2-digit code> — which device + sharing method generated this share URL (the focus of this article).

The `s` parameter — device + sharing method

s is a two-digit code (always 2 digits — s=09, s=19, s=46, etc.) that X uses to record exactly which client + which button generated the share URL. Each code is a unique combination of:

• Device type — Android phone, iPhone, iPad, Twitter Web (desktop), Twitter Web (mobile), or a third-party Twitter client like Gryphon.
• Sharing method — Copy Link, Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Reddit, Line, Kakao, Viber, WeChat, Hangouts, Gmail, Twitter DM, and a few platform-specific options.
• 71 distinct codes have been catalogued in total, by analysing Twitter's own front-end JavaScript (see Unfurl, the social-media URL parser).

Common `s` values you'll see in the wild

These are the ones that show up most often when you copy a tweet URL. The mapping is reverse-engineered from Twitter's JS by community researchers, not officially documented — but it's stable across years of observation:

What does `s=46` specifically mean?

s=46 means the share URL was generated by tapping “Copy Link” in the Twitter (X) iPhone app. If a friend forwards you a tweet and the URL ends in ?t=…&s=46, they used the iPhone app's Copy Link button — not the share sheet, not the web, not Android.

It's the iPhone-app counterpart to s=20 (Twitter Web Copy Link) and s=19 (Android Copy Link). Together with t=, X can tell that a particular tweet was copied from a particular iPhone session at a particular time, and whether subsequent shares of the same tweet came from the same source or different sources.

The forensic-grade detail of this scheme is also why removing s= and t= before forwarding is the right default: they encode quite a bit more than the destination needs.

The `t` parameter

t is an opaque token that's not officially documented, but observation shows it's consistent per device for a time window — multiple shares from the same Twitter session tend to carry the same or related t values, while shares from different devices have different ones.

That makes t useful to X as a join key: if two share URLs of the same tweet arrive at X's pixel with the same t, they almost certainly originate from the same device session — which lets X reason about virality (one tweet shared by a thousand different t values is genuinely spreading; one tweet shared a thousand times by a single t value looks like abuse).

From your point of view, the privacy concern is that t ties any pageview through that URL back to your device session — even after the share has bounced through multiple recipients.

What does X actually learn from these?

Combined, t and s give X a fine-grained attribution signal every time someone clicks a share URL:

• Which device produced the share — the s code identifies the device category and the surface (iPhone app, Android, web).
• Which sharing button was used — s also encodes the button (Copy Link, Email, Snapchat, SMS, …).
• Approximate device fingerprint via session — t correlates multiple shares from the same session, even across tweets.
• Funnel analytics — how often a tweet gets shared, on which surfaces, and how often those shares convert to engagement back on X.
• Abuse signals — repeated identical t across a tweet's share URLs suggests automation or coordinated sharing.

How LinkClean removes `t=` and `s=` (without breaking YouTube)

Naïvely stripping any t= parameter would break YouTube share links — YouTube's t=42 is the start-at-N-seconds timestamp, not a tracker. LinkClean's catalog scopes the t/s cleaning rules to x.com and twitter.com only. On those hosts, t and s are stripped on every cleaning surface (share extension, widget, app, QR). On every other host they're left alone.

Same goes for X's less-common share-tail parameters: cn= and refsrc= (X-specific) both ship default-on, host-scoped. The cleaned URL is https://x.com/handle/status/<tweet-id> — the canonical permalink you'd get by typing the URL into the address bar yourself.

If you want to see this transformation explicitly, paste an X share URL into the LinkClean app — the History view shows the original alongside the cleaned version, with t, s, and any extras called out as stripped.