Delete your tweets (for free) before you yeet

November 17, 2024 10:53 AM

Easy and free script for bulk-deleting your tweets. Courtesy of Luca Hammer. You do need to download and then unzip your archive, and briefly reanimate your Xitter account if you've already deactivated. Other than that, it was a couple of copy/pastes and my 17 years of history was gone in half an hour. Sad, but necessary.
posted by cyndigo (15 comments total)

This looks like a handy tool for those who need it. But all my tweets were silly jokes Musk is welcome to poison his AI all he likes with that nonsense.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:18 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

(great post title, by the way)
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:18 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

Damnit.

I requested my archive and got a zip file with instructions and NO archive. I ended up chalking it up to Twitter fuckery and went ahead and deactivated this moring.

So if anyone has advice how to actually get my archive using Safari, I’ll reactivate long enough to run this script.

Thanks for this.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 11:20 AM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]

I was just about to post an AskMe about this, so thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

I recommend doing this, but keep in mind that Twitter still has your tweets and DMs in their backups.

Thinking about Musk personally going through the DMs of his ex-wives and people he dislikes always gives me the heebie jeebies.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:36 AM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'm another whose archive was an empty folder. I manually went through my media tab and saved my old barroom drawings (I should have all those on an old computer that I haven't booted up in years but this seemed easier than dusting it off, somehow). I may repost some of them to blueski sometime. Beyond that I guess I don't care too much what happens to my old weak posts.
posted by rodlymight at 11:55 AM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]

Does anyone else get this error:
Uncaught SyntaxError: JSON.parse: expected property name or '}' at line 2 column 5 of the JSON data
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:26 PM on November 17, 2024

I downloaded my tweets before I killed my Twitter sometime last year -- maybe two years ago? I can't remember anymore -- but why? What the fuck am I even gonna do with it? And I have no idea where that download is now. Do I really need to relive livetweeting an episode of Dexter in 2011? Just blow it up, it's very liberating.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:30 PM on November 17, 2024 [12 favorites]

If I delete my account though, can someone reactivate the same name? Not that I'm sure there are hosts of bots desperate to pretend to be me.
posted by Augenblick at 12:58 PM on November 17, 2024

If you have/had a lot of followers or a good handle, then the general recommendation is to delete tweets, unfollow everyone and then leave the account dormant rather than deleting.

Twitter still has your tweets and DMs in their backups.
What I did was delete tweets in batches over a period of a few weeks, I don't know how long Twitter keep their backups, but they probably are not going to go to the trouble of restoring multiple backups and comparing them to figure out which are the most complete.
posted by Lanark at 2:26 PM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

Fir the Twitter archive, if you are on a Mac, you have to right click and save to file, on the link. If you just click it, the auto download goes weird and you only get a README.
posted by funkaspuck at 5:05 PM on November 17, 2024 [4 favorites]

“Necessary” is a powerful descriptor here. I’m not sure it’s the right one for me, though it surely is for others.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:36 PM on November 17, 2024

I missed out on the horrors of Twitter by doing this when Elmo took over. Sometimes salting the earth is the only rational course of action.
posted by tommasz at 6:38 AM on November 18, 2024 [2 favorites]

If you're moving to Bluesky, BlueArk will copy/paste all your tweets there and backdate them. It's a paid service, but it cost me under $10 to move a 10 year old account.
posted by Pallas Athena at 6:54 AM on November 18, 2024 [6 favorites]

I don't know how long Twitter keep their backups, but they probably are not going to go to the trouble of restoring multiple backups and comparing them to figure out which are the most complete.

It's *very* likely that on the back-end "delete tweet" simply means "set the is_deleted flag on the record" -- i.e. they're not really deleting anything, just hiding it.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:49 AM on November 18, 2024 [1 favorite]