tweet-delete 🦜🔫

tweet-delete is a small Python tool for automatically deleting your tweets (and favourites) after some specified amount of time. It is intended to be used to create self-destructing tweets. tweet-delete runs continuously, and will check your timeline every hour to see if there are any new tweets which need to be deleted. You may also specify a minimum engagement metric, which allows you to delete only the tweets that are junk 🗑.

Self-destructing tweets are the hippest, trendiest, coolest thing on Twitter right now. Want to be cool and hip? You need tweet-delete. By creating artificial scarcity you can ten ex (10x) or one-hundred ex (100x) your personal brand. 😎

In spite of the low technical barrier to entry for using this Twitter bot (or any similar ones), it does require following some instructions, and the Twitter dev account approval process is long and arduous. In other words, you will easily be in the top 0.1% of technically skilled Twitter users. You will be super extra hip and cool, and in the upper echelons of thought leadership, simply by using this tool. Wear your badge of honour loud and proud. Perhaps write "These tweets self destruct." in your bio?

Quickstart

NOTE: This tool will delete your tweets. Please do not use this tool if you don't want your tweets to be deleted.

1. Set up Twitter Dev account

To get started, you'll need to go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps and set up a Twitter developer account, and create an "App".

Once you're approved (after several days or weeks of waiting), move on to the next step.

2. Generate API access tokens

Follow the instructions here to generate your API access tokens. Save these somewhere, as you'll be needing them later.

3. Find a place to run the codes

You'll need a computer somehere, perhaps somewhere up in the clouds, to run the codes. For your convenience, this repo includes a Helm chart to run this tool on Kubernetes, which is extremely AI these days (if you hadn't heard).

4. Install

This is a standard Python package, which can be installed using pip:

$ pip install tweet-delete
...

Alternatively, you can simply use the pre-built Docker image if you prefer.

5. Run

Run the script by passing it the API keys you generated above. It will run continuously, and tweet all tweets that are older than --delete-older-than days starting on Jan 1, 2019. If you want to also remove favourites, add the --remove_favorites flag.

$ tweet-delete \
    --consumer_key=<consumer_key> \
    --consumer_secret=<consumer_secret> \
    --access_token_key=<access_token_key> \
    --access_token_secret=<access_token_secret> \
    --delete_older_than="7 days" \
    --delete_everything_after=2019-01-01 \
    --minimum_engagement=1
...

Now the script will run forever, and delete all of your tweets older than 7 days as long as it's running. Congratulations! 🎉🎊🥳

Performance

The script features an asynchronous, event-driven core, base on the excellent gevent library. tweet-delete should have no difficulty achieving a tweet deletes per second (TDPS) throughput well in excess of 1,000 TDPS. However, practically speaking, you will likely hit the Twitter API rate limits long before hitting the script's limits.

Deployment with Helm

There's a Helm chart included for your convenience. To use the chart, copy helm/tweet-delete/values.yaml somewhere, and install the chart:

Now install the chart:

$ cp helm/tweet-delete/values.yaml myvalues
$ helm upgrade --install tweet-delete helm/tweet-delete -f myvalues.yaml
Release "tweet-delete" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Mar 13 15:08:31 2019
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: DEPLOYED

RESOURCES:
==> v1/Deployment
NAME          READY  UP-TO-DATE  AVAILABLE  AGE
tweet-delete  0/1    1           0          46s

==> v1/Pod(related)
NAME                           READY  STATUS             RESTARTS  AGE
tweet-delete-79bdbd995b-2mrmj  0/1    ContainerCreating  0         0s

Sweeeeeet 😎

How can I recover deleted tweets?

You can't! They're gone!

If your account is public, it's possible that your tweets have been archived somewhere. The internet is a semi-free and open place, so it's relatively easy to archive anything you find on it. For example, you may want to try recovering your old tweets from https://snapbird.org/.

Limitations

Twitter does not let you retrieve more than 3,200 tweets from their public API, thus you cannot delete more than 3,200.