untweetify

Delete each and every tweet you ever tweeted.

Also, do it with bash. Like real women do.

Prerequisites

• an archive of your twitter data, in the form of a zip, delivered to you by twitter upon request at https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data, unpacked. It's the data/tweets.js and data/tweets-part*.js files that are of interest to us, since we will extract each and every tweet's ID from them, as twitter API only gives us access to the most recent 3200 or so tweets.

• your own custom little twitter app created on the twitter developer dashboard, https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/dashboard/

  • configure for oauth2 authorization, as a confidential client
  • set the callback URL to http://localhost:1666/
  • generate and copy the client ID and client secret

• bash, curl, nc and jq installed on your system

• export the following env variables

TW_CLIENT_ID=<your app client ID>
TW_CLIENT_SECRET=<your app client secret>
TW_ARCHIVE_PATH=<the path to where the data directory from the archive resides>

Authenticate

Run

bash untweetify.sh auth

It should open a browser (or give you the URL to open manually) with a page where you must authorize the app to access your twitter account. Once the flow finishes without errors, it should inform you that

Yay. I am now authenticated and ready to nuke your tweets.

In both the browser and console.

Prepare

Run

bash untweetify.sh prep

Once it finishes, you should get the following files in your working directory:

pending.txt
deleted.txt

The latter one being empty, and the former one containing all the IDs of the tweets you ever tweeted.

Nuke

Run

bash untweetify.sh nuke

It will run a long while, as you are rate limited to deleting at most 50 tweets every 15 minutes. By default we do 45 tweets every 16 minutes as rate limiting never really works fine. Run this in a screen session or somesuch.

Once it's done, all the IDs of the tweets deleted are in deleted.txt, and there's also a file failed.txt that contains the IDs of the tweets that failed to be deleted.

If you preserve the deleted.txt file, the next run will only attempt to delete the tweets that are not present in this file.