How to Delete Old Tweets so Enemies Can’t Reach Them
To cleanse your home (or yourself) of spiritual impurities, you can turn to smearing, a ritual that involves burning a bunch of sage to ward off negative energy while promoting harmony and well-being. For those using Twitter, this negative energy and malice may simply be present in their timeline and @ -replies. If you have enough time, even your own satirical tweets can be used as a cap to brand you as a villain. You can’t burn Twitter down (yet), but you can do the next best thing: clear your Twitter account. Here’s how to get rid of all your tweets and start 2018 with a clean sheet of 280 characters.
First, archive your tweets
Before you start erasing your 140 character past life entries, you need to get an archive of your tweets. This not only allows you to jot down your hilarious messages, but use this archive to look even deeper into your back directory by deleting over 3,200 of the most recent tweets that Twitter allows you to access through its API. This is good news for users with hundreds of thousands of tweets posted.
Here’s how to download an archive of your tweets:
- On your computer, go to the Twitter settings page .
- Scroll down and select Request Archive.
- When the archiving is complete (this may take a while), click the Download Now link sent to the email address associated with your Twitter account.
- Download the .zip file to your computer.
Take advantage of a free web service
Now that you have your Twitter history saved for posterity, you can use that archive to further destroy your public tweet history.
You probably don’t want to open up any command lines to write your own tweet deletion scripts, work with OAuth access tokens to prove you are indeed your Twitter account, or read any GitHub documentation to understand how the Twitter API works. Luckily for you, you don’t have to. Free services like Cardigan or Twoolbox can comb through your last 3,200 tweets and delete them selectively or all at once. Uploading your archived tweets to Cardigan will allow you to view your own timeline and allow you to search for tweets based on their content (allowing you to remove any mention of Donald Trump from your timeline) or time. You can also sort them by date (or date ranges) and remove accordingly. You can also use the Cardigan to distinguish tweets selectively or all at once.
If it means so much, just pay
If free options like Cardigan go off or disappear, you can always shell out a few dollars to take advantage of the tweet deletion service. The program, simply titled Tweet Deleter , appears to be aimed at those who want more granular control over what gets removed and what isn’t thrown in the trash, charges a monthly fee for being able to delete more than 5 tweets a day, and even more for deleting. … any tweets older than your last 3200 posts using your archive. However, unless you’re into heavy twittering or doing the outside fuss as a social media manager, this type of service is probably not needed when shelling out a few bucks for a one-time service.
To that end, Tweet Eraser charges a much more understandable one-time fee of $ 6.99 or $ 9.99 for 30 days of use, while the more expensive option gives you the option to store deleted tweets in Tweet Eraser (just in case you want to an easier way to browse them without going through the compressed archive) and create saved search filters (in case you have a habit of offending your boss, Chad, in the middle of the night) that you can use to regularly clean up your account. This is more than enough time to bring your timeline in line with the new year and get rid of any potentially damn jokes you have in your timeline before the villains turn them against you.
To learn more about deleting tweets, watch this video.