Delete tweets via download archive

HELLO! I'm looking for someone to help maintain this app going forward - if you are interested please reach out @ryangiglio.

TLDR; What is this?

A Glitch app that walks you through deleting your whole Twitter archive without having to give access to a 3rd party service. It should take about minutes, but requires very little technical knowledge and I promise there are good instructions. If you need help, give me a holler on Twitter @ryangiglio.

If you're down, click this button to get started:

NOTE: April 11, - It is a known issue that people with too many tweets may have trouble using this app, either because their `www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar` file is too large to upload, or because it's split into multiple parts. Unfortunately, I don't currently have the time to continue development of this app and find a resolution to this issue. If that makes it unusable to you, I'm truly sorry.

NOTE: July 30th, - This app has been updated to work with Twitter's new archive format! If you tried to use it previously and found that your archive was missing the required `www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar` file, click the above button to start over. It will now work with `www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar` as well.

Why delete your archive?

Twitter is our public stream of consciousness – a place to dump half-baked ideas, jokes, and commentary. It can feel like, once a Tweet falls off your followers' timelines and people stop interacting with it, it's effectively gone. Sure, it lives on your profile, but who scrolls back through thousands of old, out of context tweets?

Turns out, a lot of people. Anytime someone is thrust in the public eye, Internet sleuths and milkshake duck speedrunners race through their archives looking for a bad tweet to put on blast.

The world changes. People’s beliefs and points of view change. Importantly, Twitter itself has changed, from a place for microblogging status updates to the place where we have The Discourse. The platform makes it effortless for bad actors to elevate your old tweets, easy for their followers to mistake them for new ones, and impossible for you to provide meaningful context.

With fascism and its mobs on the rise, there’s also an increasingly real need for people to stay anonymous. Often, all one needs to doxx you are a few names, locations, and geotagged tweets. Even if you’ve changed your handle to an alias and scrubbed everything identifying you could find, they’re frighteningly good at following breadcrumbs.

Permanently deleting anything is scary, but think about how often you revisit your old tweets. Probably never? If you're like most of us, you won't even know they're gone. Also, even if you DO miss them, the first step in this process is downloading your archive. You'll still have them, even if the internet doesn't.

I know it's a big decision, so think about it. This app will be here whenever you're ready.

Why use this app? Why not others?

I created this app to address a few issues I had with other Tweet delete services. Here are the benefits:

It's free

First off: I'm all in favor of people paying for software. Development is work and people deserve to be compensated for it. That said, given the increasing risk of real-world consequences from Twitter mobs, I believe this is a service people should have access to free of charge.

It's open source and you run it yourself

For an app to delete your tweets, it needs access to your Twitter account. I wasn't comfortable giving that kind of access to whatever apps happened to come up first on Google. The way this app works, you create your own API credentials and run the code yourself. Since it's open source you can see exactly what it's doing. Because Glitch is so great, that is all much easier than it sounds.

It deletes ALL your tweets

Because of limitations to Twitter's API, unless an app lets you upload your archive file, the most it can do it delete your last 3, tweets. Most of them don't do this.

Ready?

Click this button to get started: