How to . . . delete your tweets

Have you ever just wanted to wipe the slate clean and start fresh? It can be tempting. Social media can be a hostile place, and not everyone is keen on having their thoughts and opinions out there, open for interpretation (or misinterpretation), by anyone who happens across them.

Old social media posts can come back to haunt you at inopportune moments. An out-of-context tweet or a badly worded reply can cause damage to your reputation, personal or professional. Or perhaps you’ve changed your views on something — as is possible given that some people have grown up with social media — and are a bit embarrassed by your past views.

Twitter doesn’t offer a way to mass delete your tweets, you have to do it post by post. Depending on how prolific you have been on the site, that could get very tedious, very quickly.

To delete a single tweet, you have to go to the update in question, tap or click the three dots in the corner of the tweet and tap delete tweet. The post will vanish from your timeline, and won’t be visible to anyone refreshing their feed after you delete.

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As always, there are caveats. Your tweets will be deleted from people’s timelines, and retweets of your posts will also vanish. However, if someone has quote tweeted you, that will stay. Ditto for any tweets where the old way of retweeting — copying the person’s update manually into your tweet — has been used.

And screenshots are a possibility. So there is no guarantee that your previous tweets won’t make an untimely reappearance.

Mass deleting

What if you want to wipe you whole account clean and start from the beginning? That’s a little more difficult. One option is to register a new account, and delete the old one. If you want to keep your username, you can change the username of your old account before deleting it, and switch it to your newly registered account.

However, that means losing all the people you follow, and those who follow you. So what is the alternative?

There are third-party services that offer the ability to mass delete your old posts. As always, it’s best to read the terms and conditions of these services before you give them access to your Twitter account, and once the job is done, revoke that access.

TweetDeleter

A subscription service that will cost from €4 per month, TweetDeleter will wipe your Twitter history as clean as possible.

Twitter gives immediate access to your most recent 3,200 posts; anything over that, TweetDeleter says, requires access to your Twitter archive thanks to the limitations of Twitter’s API. That will mean downloading your Twitter archive and uploading it to TweetDeleter.

The service will also allow you to clear your favourite tweets from your account.

There are several tiers of membership, from the €4 standard plan that allows you to delete up to 500 tweets per month to the unlimited version at €6 per month, that will wipe all your tweets since the beginning of your account — exclusions mentioned above aside.

TweetDelete

Like TweetDeleter, this service that will delete tweets in a certain time range, from older than a week, a month, a year, to everything you’ve ever tweeted. It is bound by that 3,200 limit for immediate access; anything over that will require the archive upload and a subscription fee.

You can also set the service to periodically delete your old tweets, so your account is cleared out regularly.

If you stump up for premium access, with a once-off fee of $15, you can choose to delete specific tweets by ID, exclude up to 100 from the mass deletion and run automatic deletion indefinitely.

Circleboom

A social media management tool, Circleboom counts companies such as Netflix, the BBC and L’Oréal among its customers. But aside from the ability to schedule your posts, it also allows you to delete your Twitter history, undo retweets and remove likes. The free version is limited to the last 50 likes you registered on the platform and the last 50 tweets you posted; to do anything more you’ll have to sign for a paid account.

If you do decide to go for the nuclear option and delete your past posts, you can apply filters such as deleting retweets only, or focus on tweets from a certain year.

Revoke access

Once you have finished clearing out your account and you have no need for third-party deletion services, it’s a good idea to revoke any access you may have granted to your account. Go to Settings>Security and account access>Apps and sessions>Connected apps. There you will see a list of apps that have been granted access to your account, and when you gave that permission. Tap the ones you want to remove from your account, and select revoke access.