The project is in a healthy, maintained state
A CLI (as in Command Line Interface) to delete your tweets based on faves, RTs, and time. There are some services out there with a friendly web interface, but this is not one of them. You must know the basics of working with a UNIX terminal and configuring a Twitter API app, as this will only work if you have a Twitter Developer account. Due to the irrevocable nature of tweet deletion, all delete commands are dry-run true, meaning you must call all of them with a --dry-run=false flag if you want them to really do something. Called with --dry-run=false, there is no way to revoke tweet deletion. They are just gone, disappeared into the ether (or the stashed in the Twitter-owned secret place you have no access to without a mandate since nothing gets really deleted from the web these days, folks). This tool won't delete all of your tweets in one fell swoop; it is more of a way to delete your old tweets from time to time. The Twitter API rate limits are relatively complicated, and I don't even wanna go there, but if you do intend on deleting all of your tweets, you can do it with this CLI and some perseverance. I did delete more than 100k of mine by using this script every day for a couple of weeks. The more tweets you delete, the fewer of them you have, and with time the rate limits won't be that much of a problem. I Delete My Tweets (IDMT) can delete your tweets by fetching them via API using an APP you will have to set up yourself. Still, it can also delete tweets from an CSV (comma-separated file) that you can generate from the archive you can request from twitter.com by going to Settings and privacy > Your Account > Download an archive of your data. It is out of the scope of this CLI to generate the CSV (at the moment) but there are scripts out there that can do this for you.
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 Dependencies

Development

>= 1.0, < 3
~> 1.29
~> 2.10.0

Runtime

~> 6.1.7.3
~> 3.0.9
~> 2.7.6
~> 0.5.5
~> 1.2.1
~> 7.0.0
~> 3.6.0
~> 3.4.2
 Project Readme

I Delete My Tweets

Coverage Status

Screen Shot 2022-05-11 at 19 04 53

A CLI (as in Command Line Interface) to delete your tweets based on faves, RTs, words, hashtags, and time.

There are some services out there with a friendly web interface, but this is not one of them. You must know the basics of working with a UNIX terminal and configuring a Twitter API app, as this will only work if you have a Twitter Developer account.

Due to the irrevocable nature of tweet deletion, all delete commands are dry-run true, meaning you must call all of them with a --dry-run=false flag if you want them to really do something.

Called with --dry-run=false, there is no way to revoke tweet deletion. They are just gone, disappeared into the ether (or stashed in the Twitter-owned secret place you have no access to without a mandate since nothing gets really deleted from the web these days, folks).

This tool won't delete all of your tweets in one fell swoop; it is more of a way to delete your old tweets from time to time. The Twitter API rate limits are relatively complicated, and I don't even wanna go there, but if you do intend on deleting all of your tweets, you can do it with this CLI and some perseverance. I did delete more than 100k of mine by using this script every day for a couple of weeks. The more tweets you delete, the fewer of them you have, and with time the rate limits won't be that much of a problem.

I Delete My Tweets (IDMT) can delete your tweets by fetching them via API using an APP you will have to set up yourself. Still, it can also delete tweets from a CSV (comma-separated file) that you can generate from the archive you can request from twitter.com by going to Settings and privacy > Your Account > Download an archive of your data.

Once you get your zipped archive from Twitter, unzip it, and find the tweet.js file.

IDMT can convert that into a CSV file with:

$ i_delete_my_tweets convert to_csv path_to_tweet.js

TIP: You can find an example of the CSV header in the project's root folder.

These are the keys/values that make the script work. They are read from and written to a .i_delete_my_tweets env file in your user directory (~/). You can fill the values yourself or work with the commands (see Usage) to do that interactively.

KEY VALUE DESCRIPTION
CONSUMER_KEY String Your Twitter App key
CONSUMER_SECRET String Your Twitter App secret
ACCESS_TOKEN String Account access token
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET String Access token secret
OLDER_THAN "2022-04-28 21:20:47 -0300" A timestamp (quote to avoid system parser problems)
PATH_TO_CSV './tweets.csv' A path to a CSV file
FAVE_THRESHOLD 3 Minimum number of faves to skip deletion
RT_THRESHOLD 5 Minimum number of RTs to skip deletion
WITH_WORDS #FML, trump, musk A comma-separated list of words and hashtags that, if found on a tweet, would delete it immediately.
If this list is not empty, IDMT will use the words only and bypass any FAVE or RT threshold criteria.
OLDER_THAN is always taken into account, though.
SCREEN_NAME jack The account screen_name

Since you have to call commands with --dry-run=false for them to really take action, just play around with the skip rules before using --dry-run=false and see what works for you.

Install

$ gem install i_delete_my_tweets

IDMT is compatible with ruby-2.6.5 up.

Usage

$ i_delete_my_tweets -h

Will print all commands and options.

$ i_delete_my_tweets -v

Gives you the version.

Commands

$ i_delete_my_tweets config store key value

Set-up

Config

$ i_delete_my_tweets config store CONSUMER_KEY 9183921819809283910f
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store CONSUMER_SECRET 0293090239-2039209302-238392839
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store RT_THRESHOLD 2
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store FAVE_THRESHOLD 2
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store OLDER_THAN 2021-11-02
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store SCREEN_NAME mytwitterhandle
$ i_delete_my_tweets config store WITH_WORDS "#fml, #drunktweets, rogan"

IDMT can generate an ACCESS_TOKEN and ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET for you using a PIN provided that you do have a Twitter App setup and CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.

You can bypass most of the configuration by doing a

$ i_delete_my_tweets config authorize_with_pin <consumer-key> <consumer-value>

It will generate a URL that will take you to Twitter and issue a PIN. Then IDMT will configure ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, and SCREEN_NAME for you.

At any point, you can check if all keys/values are good to go with

$ i_delete_my_tweets config check

Delete

$ i_delete_my_tweets delete start

Will start traversing the API for your tweets and applying the OLDER_THAN, FAVE_THRESHOLD, and RT_THRESHOLD rules (they are applied in this order). These rules are NOT COMBINED; the tweet is deleted if one of the rules matches. If you set up words or hashtags, then IDMT will use those to match tweets up to deletion; OLDER_THAN and presence in WITH_WORDS will be used as criteria instead.

Pass in --dry-run=false if you REALLY want to delete them otherwise this command will just output the tweets it would delete but doesn't because the default flag for delete commands is --dry-run=true.

$ i_delete_my_tweets delete from_csv

Will use the tweets from the CSV file and not fetch the API for them. This is a nice option if you want to avoid some of the API rate limits and will be a little faster since it will not do the initial tweet-fetching over HTTP.