I used the Twitter Archive Eraser to delete all my favourites and all my tweets on Twitter.
This tool is much faster than all the other solutions I’ve seen because it requires you to download your Twitter archive, first. That’s always a good idea. Then it gets the tweet ids from the archive instead of requesting them from Twitter itself, and that’s what makes it so fast.
Same idea but do it yourself? tweetkiller is a Python script that does the same thing: it goes through your archive to extract the IDs.
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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How come, if I may? I’m conflicted on the subject of Twitter, but at the moment mildly disposed to remain present there for the next little while. I would be curious to know more about the analysis that led you to choose otherwise, in order to better inform my own.
– Alexis 2018-03-28 15:23 UTC
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The most important part first: the account still exists. I just deleted the stuff I had posted in the past. As for the rationale, I explained my thinking as part of the documentation for Mastodon Archive: «I might want to keep a copy of my toots [tweets], but I don’t think they have much value going back months and years. I never read through years of tweeting history! This only benefits your enemies, never your friends. So I want to expire my toots. We can always write a blog post about the good stuff.»
Basically: on IRC, I don’t want people to keep logs. We keep logs of mails sent and Skype conversations held at the office because of money changing hands. But I don’t log conversations with my parents, my wife. That would be creepy. Actually, we are sometimes manipulated into keeping logs going back forever because the software offers it (calling it “backup”), or makes deleting conversations harder than necessary – but who benefits? I never tell my wife “you’re wrong and I have the logs to prove it!” But they can always go back through the logs and figure out what I might be interested in, what my credit score might be, who my friends are – making profiles, doing network analysis, and all that. So: keeping any data on the servers of companies always benefits them eventually and it rarely benefits us.
– Alex 2018-03-28 16:41 UTC
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That makes a lot of sense! Thank you.
– Alexis 2018-03-29 09:54 UTC