Spring Cleaning Issue
How to batch delete your old tweets so you don't get canceled
Trust us — those years-old hot takes are nothing but trouble.
We’ve all sent tweets we probably shouldn’t have sent. Sure, you may not have compared Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to 9/11, turned footage from your high-profile murder trial into a meme about gas prices, or felt the need to creepily weigh-in on Taylor Swift’s fertility, but we promise you they aren’t all gems. Everyone has tweeted something that someone didn’t like.
Send a bad-taste tweet about the wrong person and you might find yourself serving 150 hours of unpaid community service. Elon Musk can’t even tweet Hitler memes anymore without getting bullied by the media.
Call it cancel culture or call it holding people responsible for saying problematic things online — the bottom line is that you never know who’s looking at your old tweets and ready to drag you. The last thing you want while job hunting or trying to date is to have someone bring up an edgy take you fired off years ago.
We’re not telling you to fear getting “canceled,” but it never hurts to take a look at your previous tweets with fresh eyes. There are plenty of reasons to delete your tweets. Twitter only lets you delete one tweet at a time, so we’re gonna have to look elsewhere to batch delete your aging internet musings.
How to delete all your tweets
There are plenty of third-party websites that can cull your Twitter feed but the most trusted and longest-running service is TweetDelete.
With TweetDelete, you can quickly delete up to 3,200 of your most recent tweets with just a few clicks — for free. You can also set up your account so that your tweets are automatically trashed on a regular basis.
For more prolific tweeters, you can nuke all your tweets with TweetDelete’s paid premium membership. There are a few bonus features as well, like longer automation options and the ability to exclude certain tweets from the process.
We’re on team “Tweets weren’t meant to last forever,” but if you want to archive your Twitter data and store it privately. You can request a download of your Twitter data in your settings under the “Your account” tab. You’ll also need this data file if you want to use TweetDelete’s premium feature to delete your entire history.
Once you’ve completed that, it’s time to man that delete button.
- On a web browser, navigate to the TweetDelete homepage.
- Click on the big, blue “Sign in with Twitter” button in the center of the page.
- If you weren’t already signed in to your Twitter account on the same browser, enter your credentials here and click the “Authorize app” button to give TweetDelete access to your account. If you’re just here for a one-time deletion, you can revoke this access later.
- At the top of the website, click on the “Tweets” tab. There are a few selections you’ll need to make on this page.
- First, double-check the listed username to make sure it’s the account you’re looking to remove tweets from.
- Use the “Age of tweets to delete” drop-down menu to select a time period for deletion. This is more relevant if you’re setting up a repeat deletion schedule, which we’ll address in a moment.
- If you want to just rid your timeline of a specific topic, you can type specifics into the “Only tweets containing this word/phrase” form. Fair warning though: this is an automated process that won’t take typos or context into account.
- Using the “Run this task” drop-down menu, you can set this deletion task to run every few days. If you select this, the app will run a deletion using the rules you set above regularly for six months. You can jump on and cancel it at any time, or run it again manually to reset that six-month timer.
- Check the box that confirms you’ve read TweetDelete’s terms (basically a quick sidebar that says deleted tweets cannot be recovered and that it's not responsible for glitches on Twitter’s end.)
- Click the “Delete my tweets!” button to start the deletion process.
It may take a few minutes to delete all your tweets if you’re nearing that upper threshold of 3,200 tweets, but it’ll get them all eventually as long as you don’t cancel the process. The next time you log in to TweetDelete, you’ll see a record of the deletion on the homepage.
If you had more than 3,200 tweets to delete, you’ll need to download your user data from Twitter and upload it under TweetDelete’s premium tab before starting the deletion process.
How to revoke TweetDelete’s access to your account
If you’re only running a one-time deletion and don’t want TweetDelete to have access to your account anymore, you can revoke access through Twitter in just a couple of clicks.
- Log in to your Twitter account.
- Navigate to the settings menu.
- Click on the “Security and account access” tab.
- Click on “Apps and sessions.”
- Click on “Connected apps.” Here, you’ll see a list of any app you’ve given access to your Twitter data in one way or another. Just click on the app you’d like to remove from your account and click “Revoke app permissions” on its page.
