Twitter CEO and Co Founder, Jack Dorsey addresses students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), on November 12, 2018 in New Delhi, India.
Amal KS | Hindustan Times | Getty Images
There are ways to automatically delete your old tweets on a recurring schedule so that it’s harder for people to find some of the silly things you may have said in the past. It might be helpful if you’re applying to new jobs, planning to run for office or just want to keep on top of the things you’ve said online.
There are still plenty of ways to find old tweets, most stuff online is archived, but at least people browsing through your Twitter feed won’t be able to see your random comments to friends, silly one-off remarks or something really terrible you said that you shouldn’t have.
I recommend TweetDelete.net. But sometimes free tools like this vanish and you might have to find another one. The first option I used to delete my tweets for a few years no longer exists, for example, and Twitter itself doesn’t have an option to delete your tweets in bulk. That means you have to turn to third-party tools.
Anyway, let’s get going, here’s what you do.
How to automatically delete your old tweets
- Go to TweetDelete.net in your web browser.
- Tap “Sign in with Twitter” and log in with your Twitter username and password.
- Choose “Authorize App.” This gives the app permissions to see your tweets (it needs to in order to delete them), follow and unfollow accounts for you, update your profile, post and delete tweets, manage lists and more. It’s a lot of permissions, but TweetDelete says it only asks for it in order to do the deleting and that it doesn’t sell any data.
- Now confirm how far back you want to delete. I choose all tweets older than one month, but there are a variety of options.
- You can also choose to delete tweets only containing certain phrases.
- Finally, you’ll set TweetDelete to perform the action just once or every few days. I recommend picking “automatically every few days” so that it constantly deletes older tweets.
- Confirm you agree to the terms and understand you can’t get deletes tweets back.
That’s it. Now TweetDelete will run through your old tweets and show a progress bar as it moves back through your timeline and removes your old posts. I had about 2,300 and it took a few minutes.