TwitterUtilities

Python3 utility to automate data collection, tweet deletion, etc.

Probably less useful now that Twitter is moving to a paid API, but it's your money.

Setup:

Clone the repo; use pip to pick up rauth, pytz, ujson.

Getting started:

Go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps and create an app. Generate secrets and populate src/secrets.json with your new API keys. Make sure your app has write permission if you want to delete tweets! (Default permissions actually include write permissions because Twitter is ridiculous.)

To collect tweets:

Edit USERNAMES in src/acquire_user_tweets.py to include a list of usernames to collect. Make sure that NUM_QUERIES is set high enough to collect as many tweets as you want from each account. (Each query collects up to 200 tweets, max 3200 can be collected from an account. It's recommended to set NUM_QUERIES to 16-20, since some queries will return fewer than 200 tweets.

To delete your tweets:

Either collect your tweets using src/acquire_user_tweets.py or by downloading your Twitter archive from https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and point src/delete_own_tweets.py to the file containing your tweets. (Set DELETE_FROM_FULL_ARCHIVE = True if you downloaded your archive from Twitter's web UI instead of from src/acquire_user_tweets.py) Next, set date and Tweet ID limits for the subset of those tweets which you wish to delete. Finally, run src/delete_own_tweets.py and wait patiently while it deletes each tweet one at a time so Twitter doesn't get mad at us for flooding it with requests.

TODO:

1. Wrap this into a command-line utility so people don't have to go editing the code
2. Add a requirements.txt file
3. Add fun features for generating pattern-of-life plots and the like

Gratitude:

If you like this software, say nice things about me to people you know. If I wrote software you like, that makes me a good person, right?