lifehacker lifehacker LifeHacker LifeHacker How to wipe out unwanted tweets from the past for the new year
Some people perform a ritual called "smudging" to remove spiritual impurities from their home (or themselves). It is a ritual to burn a bunch of sage to drive away negative energy and promote harmony and happiness.
For Twitter users, these negative energies and malice may reside in the timeline and replies. The satirical tweets you post may eventually be used as a source to brand you as a "bad guy." You can't burn Twitter (for now), but there's a workaround. Rinse and clean your account.
Here's how to get rid of past tweets and start 2018 with 280 characters on a clean blank sheet of paper.
First save the tweet
Create a tweet archive before erasing previous life records expressed in 140 characters each. This not only creates a record of the funny remarks you tweeted. With this archive, you can go deeper into your back catalog and delete tweets older than the latest 3200 that can be accessed via Twitter's API. This is good news for users who tweet hundreds of thousands of times.
Here's how to download the Tweet Archive (all Tweet history).
Use free web services
With this, I was able to leave my personal history on Twitter to posterity. Now, let's use this archive to destroy your published tweet history.
You probably don't want to write your own script to open the command line and delete tweets. No one wants to read the GitHub documentation to understand how Twitter's API works. Fortunately, you don't have to do that.
With free services like Cardigan and Twoolbox, you can check out the latest 3200 tweets, select some of them, or delete them all at once. Upload your saved tweets to Cardigan so you can check your timeline and search for tweets based on content and time. You'll be able to delete timelines that contain tweets that mention President Trump, or sort by date or date range and delete tweets accordingly. You can also use Cardigan to undo likes by selecting some or all at once.
Paid service for heavy users
If a free option like Cardigan ends or disappears, you can always pay a few dollars to get the tweet deletion service. Its name is "Tweet Deleter". The service seems to target users who want more control over what is thrown into the trash and what isn't.
If you use Tweet Deleter, you can delete up to 3000 tweets per day (up to 5 tweets for the free plan) by paying a monthly fee. For a higher monthly fee, you can use the archive to delete unlimited tweets older than the latest 3200. However, unless you're a heavy Twitter user or a social media manager in your side business, you probably don't need this service. You only need to pay a few dollars for a one-time service.
"Tweet Eraser" serves that purpose. TweetEraser has a reasonable one-time charge of $ 6.99 or $ 9.99 for 30 days of use. With the $ 9.99 option, you can save deleted tweets to TweetEraser (perfect for anyone looking for an easier way to browse tweets without having to check the compressed archive). It also provides a filter for saved search criteria that you can use to clean your account on a regular basis (perfect for those who have a habit of insulting their boss at midnight).
We still have time to organize our timeline for the new year. Take this opportunity to wipe out any potentially unfavorable jokes on your timeline. Before someone abuses it and traps you.
Image: Leon Neal / Getty Images News
Source: Twitter, Cardigan, Twoolbox, TweetDeleter, TweetEraser
Patrick Lucas Austin --Lifehacker US