How To See Timestamp On Facebook Iphone

Verifying the upload date of a video, picture or post in Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

As I think the title explains everything already, I will make this introduction short for once.
We will try to find out the exact time a post, picture or video was uploaded to several different social media websites. For now I will focus on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. One thing to keep in mind is that websites constantly change and that what I am going to show you know will become obsolete in a matter of months.
Therefore, keep an eye on the publish date of this article and ask yourself if this might still work or did it likely change? That said, give it a try and let's get started.

Upload time vs. upload date

You might find it easy to determine the upload date of a post but can you also quickly find out the exact time something was uploaded? In this article we will cover this.

Facebook

So let's start with Facebook as it is probably the most straightforward one when it comes to finding an exact upload date and time.

When you find a video or picture where it says something vague like 'on Tuesday' or '3 days ago' you can hover over it with your mouse to get more information as shown below.

But now comes the trickier part; how do we know if this was uploaded at 2:52 PM GMT or local time as this page is Turkish?

To be sure we can find out by right clicking on the page and then selecting Inspect (you can get the same by simultaneously pressing Ctrl+Shift+I). Then click on the below icon or Ctrl+Shift+C and hover your mouse over the element you want to inspect, in this case the time/date.

Now you will see the same date and hour we saw previously but in addition we see something more behind the data-utime element. This is the so-called Unix Epoch time.

You can convert this back to a 'normal' time stamp by using a Unix time converter. You can just Google one, but I usually use unixtimestamp.com.

Once we introduce the Unix time stamp it will give us a human-readable time stamp such as ISO 8601. Note here you will see the time in UTC, in other words, not the local time.

So which time was it uploaded after all, 1:52 PM or 2:52 PM? The answer is that both are correct if we consider the time zone, it was uploaded at 1:52 PM GMT and 2:52 PM GMT+1.

Confused? That's perfectly normal. What I want to say is that Facebook gives us the exact time a video or post was uploaded according to your timezone. So if you are in GMT+1 (e.g. Central European Time) you'd get 2:52 PM when hovering over the date with your mouse, if you were in UTC+0 (e.g. Greenwich Meantime) that would correspond to 1:52 PM. Facebook gives you the correct time, but not necessarily the correct time zone.

Instagram

At first sight this is very similar to Facebook, but there are some differences. When you hover over '6 days ago' it just tells you Jan 7, 2020.

But if you inspect this element (Ctrl+Shift+I followed by Ctrl+Shift+C) you will get a different type of timestamp, 2020–01–07T12:02:30.000Z. What does this mean?

While speaking about Facebook I briefly mentioned something about ISO 8601 which is a standard for time. This is the same type of standard.

2020–01–07T12:02:30.000Z equals Tue, 07 Jan 2020 12:02:30 GMT. Note that this is always displayed in UTC. As you can see this is already pretty much legible by a human. The only thing to really keep in mind is that it will always be shown in UTC and you should find out in which timezone it was likely uploaded.

Twitter

This works in a similar way as Facebook, the only difference is that Twitter uses ISO 8601 instead of Unix Epoch in the site's code.

When you hover over the date it shows you the exact time it was uploaded according to the time zone you are in.

As you can see above it shows 11:54 AM (I have my computer set to Central European Time so that means UTC+1). We can now inspect this and compare.

In the above screenshot we have 2020–01–10T10:54:09.000Z which corresponds to 10:54 AM UTC. This makes perfect sense because my timezone (Central European Time/UTC+1) is one hour ahead.

YouTube

YouTube is a bit more complicated, at least I tried to do this via Inspect but failed. Instead, I used the InVID verification plug-in for Chrome. You can install this extension for either Chrome or Firefox, then you will see this icon in your browser:

When you click on it you can just select to open the dashboard from where you will click on the icon Analysis and there you can just paste the URL of the video into the search bar and submit.

Next to Upload time you will see the exact time it was uploaded in UTC and you will have the option to convert it to another time zone, e.g. the timezone you think this video was shot.

As mentioned by @OSINTessentials on Twitter there is one caveat to doing this:

If a YouTube video is uploaded with privacy settings on Private and later made Public or Unlisted, InVid gives the time of the change as being the upload time