Skip to content

TweetDelete deletes all your old tweets

I more or less stopped using Twitter on 24 May 2020. At the time we were locked down here in the UK and, like many people, perhaps, I felt social media wasn’t doing me a huge amount of good. I had a sense of a world contracting, and the routine of checking tweets, retweets, quotes, threads and outrage every few minutes only heightened the sense of looking inwards, again and again, more and more.

I still have my account and I follow a few others via RSS using Feedbin. Twitter mediated through RSS is a completely different experience from the app – tweets are removed from the context of likes and replies, and only appear whenever your RSS reader updates. Occasionally, I’ll login after I auto-post a link to something new on this site. After all, I’ve known a few good folk on Twitter for 12 years – it’d be a shame to lose contact completely. Also, I do get the odd reply, despite obviously having removed myself from the service.

So having extricated myself from Twitter I decided to remove that huge archive of past tweets. The only value it has is to Twitter itself – as a set of data to be mined. My account’s locked, so no-one can trawl through it anyway. Enter TweetDelete, an easy to use website which simply deletes tweets older than a time period you specify; three months, in my case. Get the paid version, and it’ll schedule the process for you so you never have to worry about old tweets hanging around again.

Previous post

Next post

@leonp at fosstdon.org @leonp at mastodon.social email