Recently, I checked out my old tweets dating back to more than four years, I was quite surprised that each and every tweet I made then was pointless and to be frank, a bit childish. I wanted to delete them all, but I wasn’t ready to devote a weekend to delete more than 3000 tweets manually. Fortunately, there are few third-party services that let you delete either all the tweets, the tweets from a specific date or tweets with specific words. You can even delete just the replies, and retweets. Let’s see how.
Before We Begin
Due to Twitter’s API restrictions, a third-party app can delete only the most recent 3200 tweets. This includes the apps that I’ve used in this list. To delete tweets older than that, the apps require your entire Twitter account data to access any Tweets that are beyond that 3200 tweet mark. I have linked their privacy policy pages below and you can read those thoroughly before using the services. These apps don’t use your Twitter data for anything other than deleting the Tweets but it’s always a good practice to read their Terms of Service before giving all your data.
1. Deleting recent Tweets Using TweetDelete
TweetDelete is one of the best services which has both free and premium plans. This web app has a lot of advantages compared to other free apps such as intuitive UI, customization options, etc. The free plan lets you delete the latest 3200 tweets which is also the limit set by the Twitter API. They have transparent terms of service and Privacy policy that you can read by clicking these links.
You still have a number of options to choose which tweets to delete. You can choose the age of the tweets like Tweets older than a week, month, or a year, etc. It also lets you choose keywords so that the app will delete only those tweets containing that keyword. To delete tweets using TweetDelete, go to Tweet Delete Website and click on “Sign in with Twitter” button.
The web app will request access to your account and Tweets, click Authorize app. You will be asked to log in to your Twitter account if you are not logged in on the browser. If you’re worried about the
Select a time frame from the drop-down menu below “Age of tweets to delete”. You can also include a word/phrase if you just want to filter the tweets with that word/phrase. Leave it blank to delete all tweets. After that agree to the TweetDelete terms and click “Delete my tweets” button.
It will show you the status of how many tweets have been selected. This process may take a long time to delete depending on the number of tweets. Once finished, you will be notified.
If you don’t intend on using the service again, you can easily revoke access. Simply open Twitter > click More > Settings and privacy > Account > Apps and sessions > click on tweetdelete.net and click Revoke access.
This method has an annoying caveat, the limit of 3,200 tweets also includes deleted tweets. Let me explain, if you delete 100 tweets, TweetDelete would still consider those and effectively only delete 3100 tweets. This means that you can’t use the free method, repetitively, to delete 3,200 tweets in batches. In simple words, if your account has less than 3,200 tweets, this web app for fine for you. However, if you wish to delete more, you will have to use the premium feature.
Delete all the Tweets with the Paid Plan
If your Twitter has more than 3,200 tweets, your best bet is to use the premium feature of TweetDelete. It is a one-time payment of $9.99 but this method requires a copy of your Twitter archive. This method is common across all the services that offer bulk deletion of tweets and the only way to get past Twitter’s stringent policies.
The downloaded twitter data have links to all your tweets. So even though Twitter doesn’t provide the data more than the recent 3,200 tweets, TweetDelete can access all your tweets with those links and delete them. If you are concerned about how TweetDelete will use your data, you can check out their Privacy Policy.
First, download the Twitter archive of your account. Open Twitter > Click More > Settings and privacy > Account> Your Twitter data> type the password and click Confirm. Now, click on the Request archive button beside Twitter. It takes a few minutes to hours of time depending on the number of tweets and media you have in the data.
Once the archive download is ready, Twitter will send you a notification and link to your mail for you to download your data.
Once downloaded, upload archive to TweetDelete. Now, you can delete all the tweets regardless of when they were tweeted. Open TweetDelete on your web browser and Authorize the app.
You need to submit your Twitter archive data using their upload Page.
After completing, it will show you the status of how many tweets have been selected.
It works effortlessly as TweetDelete has all your twitter data now. You can specify the date, words, etc, to delete specific tweets, just like the free version. Click Delete my tweets! button and It will delete all the selected tweets slowly.
Once you’re done, you can then proceed to revoke the access of the TweetDelete app. Open Twitter > More > Settings and privacy > Account > Apps and sessions > click on tweetdelete.net and click on Revoke access.
2. Delete your Tweets using TweetEraser
While TweetDelete does the job for $9.99 but there is another app called TweetEraser, which offers more features and also supports multiple accounts. TweetEraser has a subscription of $6.99/month.
So if you just want to use it for one time, it comes with an even lower price comparing to TweetDelete. But if you want to use this service often, you can go with TweetDelete. Both work fine & the process is also merely the same, the only difference is their pricing strategy.
Tweet Eraser has 2 premium plans, Standard and Premium. While Standard costs $6.99/mo and premium costs $9.99/mo, the premium Eraser plan lets you keep a copy of deleted tweets. Choose a Plan, click Get Started button under it.
Connect the app with your Twitter account and click on Authorize app.
You can follow the steps mentioned above to generate a Twitter archive. Start by clicking the Import Twitter Archive/Data button and upload the Twitter Archive data to TweetEraser.
After Importing, you can choose which tweets to delete. Just click on select all, to delete all the tweets. You can also click on advanced search, where you can select tweets depending on various factors like date, words, retweets and likes count, only media or only tweets without media, etc. Once done selecting, click on the Delete Tweets button.
TweetEraser will get to work and start deleting your tweets one by one. It may take a few hours to finish the job depending on the number of tweets that are to be deleted.
Once deleted, Open Twitter > More > Settings and privacy > Account > Apps and sessions > click on tweeteraser.com and click on Revoke access. So that TweetEraser will not have access to your account anymore.
Wrapping Up
I have used many apps like Twitwipe, Cardigan, Delete All Tweets, etc but among all of them, these 2 apps are a lot better in every way possible including the user interface.
Tweetdeleter is another app that I really liked as you can auto-delete. You can set the time such as 1 week, month, 6 months, etc and this app will delete the tweets automatically after that time. It’s more setting an expiry date for tweets. But it is a bit costly and comes with a monthly subscription plan of $9.99/month for a premium account and $14.99/month for an unlimited account.