This is a simple script that helps you delete tweets (or just replies or retweets) from your timeline. There are quite a few third-party services that allow you to delete tweets, but these very likely will not allow you to delete tweets beyond the infamous 3,200 tweet limit.

Unfortunately, as of late 2018, you are required to have a Twitter Developer account in order to create a Twitter app.

1. Create a Twitter Developer account:
   1. User profile: Use your current Twitter @username.
   2. Account details: Select I am requesting access for my own personal use, set your 'Account name' to your @username, and select your 'Primary country of operation.
   3. Use case details: select 'Other', and explain in at least 300 words that you want to create an app to semi-automatically clean up your own tweets.
   4. Terms of service: Read and accept the terms.
   5. Email verification: Confirm your email address.
2. Now wait for your Twitter Developer account to be reviewed and approved.

1. Create a new Twitter app (not available as long as your Twitter Developer account is pending review).
2. Set 'Access permissions' of your app to Read and write.

1. Open your Twitter Developer's apps.
2. Click the 'Details' button next to your newly created app.
3. Click the 'Keys and tokens' tab, and find your keys, secret keys and access tokens.
4. Now you need to make these keys and tokens available to your shell environment. Assuming you are using Bash:

⚠️ Before you continue, you should be aware that most shells record user input (and thus secrets) into a history file. In Bash you could prevent this by prepending your command with a single space (requires $HISTCONTROL to be set to ignorespace or ignoreboth).

export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="your_consumer_key"
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="your_consumer_secret"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="your_access_token"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET="your_access_token_secret"

1. Open the Your Twitter data page.
2. Scroll to the 'Download your Twitter data' section at the bottom of the page.
3. Re-enter your password.
4. Click 'Request data', and wait for the email to arrive.
5. Follow the link in the email to download your Tweet data.
6. Unpack the archive, and move tweet.js to the same directory as this script.

First, install the required dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, for example, delete any tweet from before January 1, 2018:

python deletetweets.py -d 2018-01-01 tweet.js

Or only delete all retweets:

python deletetweets.py -r retweet tweet.js

You can optionally spare tweets by passing their id_str, setting a minimum amount of likes or retweets:

python deletetweets.py -d 2018-01-01 tweet.js --spare-ids 21235434 23498723 23498723

Spare tweets that have at least 10 likes, or 5 retweets:

python deletetweets.py -d 2018-01-01 tweet.js --spare-min-likes 10 --spare-min-retweets 5

Alternatively, you could run this script in a Docker container.

First, you need to build the Docker image.

docker build -t koenrh/delete-tweets .

Then, run the script using the following command.

⚠️ Before you continue, you should be aware that most shells record user input (and thus secrets) into a history file. In Bash you could prevent this by prepending your command with a single space (requires $HISTCONTROL to be set to ignorespace or ignoreboth).

docker run --env TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="$TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY" \
  --env TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="$TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET" \
  --env TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="$TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  --env TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET="$TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET" \
  --volume "$PWD:/app" --rm -it koenrh/delete-tweets -d 2018-01-01 /app/tweet.js

You could make this command more easily accessible by putting it an executable, and make sure that it is available in your $PATH.