How to Delete Your Old Tweets and Save Your Career From Your Past Self

We‘ve all been there. You‘re applying for a new job, up for a big promotion, or taking on a higher-profile role. Part of your preparation, of course, is doing a quick search of your name on social media to see what comes up.

And then you see it. That crude joke you tweeted late one night back in college. A rant about a previous employer from a few years ago when you were going through a rough patch. The edgy memes you shared with your small group of Twitter followers before your account was set to public.

Suddenly, your stomach drops. What if a hiring manager, journalist, or curious colleague stumbles upon those posts too? Will they understand the context and realize you‘ve matured since then? Or will your unprofessional past tweets reflect badly on your judgment, employability, and reputation today?

If you‘re cringing at your Twitter history, you‘re not alone. Career coaches and HR professionals say that social media background checks are now standard practice for most roles. In fact, a 2018 CareerBuilder survey found that 70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, up from just 11 percent in 2006.

"Social media is a primary vehicle of communication today, and because much of that communication is public, it‘s no surprise some recruiters and hiring managers are tuning in," said Ladan Nikravan Hayes, a career advisor at CareerBuilder.

While most people know to keep their LinkedIn profiles professional and Facebook locked down, Twitter often falls through the cracks. The conversational and casual nature of tweeting makes it easy to post unfiltered thoughts in the moment without considering the long-term implications.

Unfortunately, even if you‘ve tightened up your Twitter act in recent years, the ghosts of tweets past can still come back to haunt you. Just ask James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, who was fired by Disney after his offensive jokes from a decade ago resurfaced. Or Sarah Jeong, a New York Times writer whose old sarcastic tweets mocking white people sparked a major hiring controversy. The list goes on.

Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn apologized for his old, offensive tweets: "I am very, very different than I was a few years ago; today I try to root my work in love and connection and less in anger. I used to make a lot of offensive jokes. I don't anymore." pic.twitter.com/2zmBVYWcbF

— AJ+ (@ajplus) July 21, 2018

So what‘s the solution? You could play Whac-A-Mole and individually delete questionable tweets as you rediscover them. But with Twitter‘s advanced search, it‘s not hard for anyone to find your old posts just by filtering for certain keywords.

Plus, with over 500 million tweets sent per day and a search index going back over a decade, manually scrubbing your Twitter history is extremely tedious and impractical if you‘ve been an active user for years.

Deleting your entire account is certainly an option, but that means losing your followers, DMs, and any positive contributions you‘ve made to the Twittersphere. As Microsoft senior IT project lead Yashwanth Reddy commented:

"I would recommend against deleting your entire Twitter account and starting fresh. A blank slate arousing more suspicion than an account with a sanitized, but still robust history demonstrating growth and change over time."

The more surgical approach, in my opinion, is to bulk delete all of your tweets prior to a certain date, leaving your more recent (and presumably more mature) posts intact. By clearing out the potentially embarrassing old stuff en masse while keeping your account active, you maintain an authentic online presence without the baggage of your former Twitter self.

Luckily, there‘s a simple and free way to do exactly that. All it takes is basic Python skills, an hour of setup, and the courage to pull the trigger on your Twitter past. Let me walk you through it step-by-step.

How Many Tweets Can I Delete for Free?

The good news is that Twitter allows you to delete tweets in bulk for free using their own native API. As long as you‘re not violating their terms of service or exceeding rate limits, you can erase up to 3,200 of your most recent tweets in one go.

If you need to remove tweets older than that, you‘ll have to use a scripting method like the open-source one I describe below, which can go back through your entire archive.

There are also several paid third-party services that offer to mass delete tweets if you provide them your Twitter credentials and payment. Some popular options are TweetDeleter ($10-$15 per month), TweetEraser ($7 for 3,000 deletions), and TwitWipe ($13 one-time fee).

However, I‘m always wary of giving complete access to my accounts to unknown entities. With a few technical skills, you can achieve the same tweet-erasing results yourself, and for free.

Step 1: Request and Download Your Twitter Archive

Before we fire up the Twitter purge-o-matic, it‘s a smart idea to first download a complete backup of everything you‘ve ever tweeted. This has two benefits:

1. You‘ll be able to reference and search your full tweet history locally without the API rate limits.

2. If you later regret deleting certain tweets, at least you‘ll still have a JSON record of their contents.

Here‘s how to request your Twitter archive:

1. Log in to your Twitter account and go to Settings and privacy from the left sidebar.

2. Under the "Data and permissions" section, click on "Your Twitter data."

3. Enter your password when prompted to confirm your identity.

4. Look for the "Twitter data" section and click the "Request data" button.

5. Watch for an email from Twitter with your archive, which can take up to 24 hours to generate. It will include tweets, DMs, contacts, lists, and more.

6. Download the ZIP file linked in the email and unzip it to access the archive contents.

Step 2: Install the Bulk Delete Python Script

With your Twitter archive handy, you‘re ready to set up the free open-source tweet deleting script. It‘s written in Python, so make sure you have that installed first. (If you‘re on macOS, you should already have Python 2.7 built in.)

Here are the steps to get the script running:

1. Open Terminal (or Command Prompt on Windows).

2. Clone the delete-tweets GitHub repository:

   git clone https://github.com/QuincyLarson/delete-tweets.git

3. Navigate into the newly created local directory:

   cd delete-tweets 

4. Install the required Python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   You may need to use pip3 or python3 -m pip depending on your Python versions. Add sudo before the command if you get any permission errors.

Step 3: Create Your Twitter API Credentials

Next, you need to set up a Twitter developer account and create a new Twitter app to generate the API keys and access tokens required for the script.

Before you worry about giving API access, keep in mind that the script runs locally on your own machine. Your Twitter credentials are not sent to or stored by any third party.

1. Apply for a Twitter developer account at developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access.

2. Once approved, create a new app at developer.twitter.com/en/apps. Fill out the fields however you want, as the app is just for your personal use.

3. After creating your app, go to the "Keys and tokens" tab and make note of your API key, API secret key, and Bearer token. Generate new access token and access token secret under the same page if missing.

Step 4: Insert Your Twitter Tokens and Archive

Now, open up the deletetweets.py script in your preferred code editor.

Around lines 57-60, you should see some empty placeholders for your various Twitter tokens and keys. Replace them with the values you generated in the previous step:

CONSUMER_KEY = "insert_your_consumer_key"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "insert_your_consumer_key_secret"  
ACCESS_TOKEN = "insert_your_access_token"
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "insert_your_access_token_secret"

Next, find the tweets.csv file in your unzipped Twitter archive folder from step 1. Copy that file and place it in the same directory as the Python script, overwriting the existing blank placeholder file.

Step 5: Choose Your Twitter Deletion Date

The final step is to decide how far back you want to mass delete your Twitter history. The script will erase everything before the date you specify, while leaving more recent tweets untouched.

In Terminal, make sure you‘re in the directory containing the script. Then run a command with the following format:

python deletetweets.py -d YYYY-MM-DD

For example, if I wanted to purge all tweets before January 1, 2022, I‘d enter:

python deletetweets.py -d 2022-01-01

The script will start deleting tweets one by one, beginning with the newest and going back chronologically to the date specified. Depending on how many tweets you have, the process may take several minutes or even hours if you have a long Twitter history.

Once the script finishes, you‘ll see a message indicating the number of tweets that were deleted. Boom, just like that, your Twitter feed has been selectively scrubbed of anything before your chosen date.

Keep in mind that quote tweets, retweets, and Twitter Ads are handled a bit differently by the script. Be sure to double check that those types of posts were removed to your satisfaction.

How Far Back Does Your Twitter History Go?

So exactly how deep are we talking when we say your entire Twitter history? Well, it depends on a few factors.

The Twitter search index currently only goes back around 10 days for regular users. But for verified accounts, Twitter retains a complete permanent record of every tweet ever sent.

That means if you work for a high-profile company, are a public figure, or have a blue checkmark, your tweets could theoretically be discoverable forever unless you take action to remove them.

However, there are some practical limitations. Twitter‘s standard API only allows retrieving up to 3,200 of a user‘s most recent tweets. That‘s why we downloaded a complete archive before running the bulk delete script.

Business and enterprise customers who pay for the premium Twitter API can access up to 1.5 million historical tweets per user. But those elevated privileges still tap out after about 10 years worth of tweets.

The bottom line is unless you‘ve been an incredibly prolific tweeter since Twitter‘s early days, you should be able to purge the vast majority of your questionable tweet history using the steps above.

Tips to Protect Your Online Reputation

Of course, the only foolproof way to avoid old tweets coming back to bite you is to have not posted them in the first place. But short of inventing a time machine, the next best thing is to be proactive about curating your online presence.

Here are some bonus reputation management tips for developers and tech professionals:

• Schedule a quarterly or yearly social media hygiene review. Make it a habit to skim your recent posts and remove anything unprofessional or potentially controversial. Set a calendar reminder so you don‘t forget.

• Always tweet with your future self in mind. Before posting an edgy joke or hot take, pause for a moment and ask "Would I want this to show up in a background check in 5 years?" When in doubt, leave it out.

• Remember the first rule of online privacy. Never post anything on the internet that you wouldn‘t want to see on the front page of the New York Times, because it very well could end up there without your knowledge or consent.

• Keep heated debates and highly sensitive opinions confined to private channels and in-person discussions among trusted confidants. Publicly arguing with strangers on Twitter is rarely worth the potential damage to your professional reputation.

• Maintain strict boundaries between your personal and work online identities. Don‘t add coworkers on Facebook. Keep your LinkedIn profile buttoned up. And consider using an anonymous handle on Twitter if you want to let loose without real-life consequences.

"Cyberspace is vast, but it is also transparent, and your online persona has to withstand scrutiny not only by friends and neighbors, but also by potential employers, colleagues, professional contacts and business competitors."

• Reputation.com founder Michael Fertik

While deleting past indiscretions is a good first line of defense, the recurring lesson is that true social media discretion starts with thinking very carefully about everything you post today and tomorrow.

Assume that every public tweet is permanent, searchable, and tied to your real identity even if you later try to disavow or delete it. Archives, screenshots, and the Wayback Machine have a way of preserving "deleted" posts for posterity.

So yes, by all means, go back and clear out any career-limiting Twitter landmines you may have left in your younger days. But don‘t let your guard down going forward. The Library of Congress may have stopped archiving every tweet, but the internet never forgets.