deltwitter

WARNING: Twitter has announced to limit its free API to post-only functionality, so this script might not work for you anymore as early as February 9th, 2023.

This script is a one-off approach to deleting all tweets and retweets ever done on twitter by a given user account. It uses the TwitterOAuth library to access the official Twitter API.

Preparation

1. Log in to twitter.com and visit developer.twitter.com/en/apps.
2. Click on Create New App and enter the requested, mandatory information, agree to the Twitter Developer Agreement and click on Create your Twitter application.
3. Visit the Keys and tokens tab and note the API key and API secret key values in the Consumer API keys section for the configuration of this script.
4. Scroll down to the Access token & access token secret section and click on Create. Note the Access token and Access token secret values for the configuration of this script.
5. Enter the folder in which you downloaded this script with a command shell and execute composer require abraham/twitteroauth to install the TwitterOAuth library.
6. Copy config.php.default to config.php and configure the script.
7. Then you will have to request your Twitter archive through your account settings page. It may take a while until you receive the corresponding download link.
8. The Twitter archive contains a file called data/tweets.js that you have to use as the first parameter for the script.
9. Now you can execute the script by calling it and providing the path to the tweets.js file along. Depending on the number of tweets and retweets you have this process may take a while.
10. The tweet id of every deleted tweet and retweet is printed to the screen.
11. Should it be necessary to abort the process and resume later, you should save the last processed tweet id.
12. You can use a tweet id as an optional second parameter so that the deletion can proceed with the next tweet or retweet in the JS file.

Usage

./deltwitter.php "<path to tweets.js file>" ("<tweet id to resume>")

In case you have posted a lot of tweets and get a memory-exhaustion error you can start the script with more assigned memory like this:

php -d memory_limit=2048M ./deltwitter.php "<path to tweets.js file>" ("<tweet id to resume>")

If you want to know which IDs are contained in the file and which creation date they have then provide a non-numeric tweet ID as a second parameter.

Things to note

• This script was written with the intention to be a lowest-effort approach to automating the deletion of tweets and retweets. If it breaks anything, it is up to you to fix it. There will be absolutely no support given to anyone using this script. You have been warned.
• It seems to be impossible to delete retweets of people that have set their accounts to protected after retweeting them, unless you follow them.
• The Twitter API runs into timeouts from time to time leading to an exception in the TwitterOAuth library. Just restart the script with the last tweet id. The resume feature is fast enough.

License

This application is released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for further information.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2016-2023, Yahe

All rights reserved.