How to delete tweets

Once, the internet was fun. It’s time to move on. We’ve built up archives of our past selves online over the years — tweets, social media, messageboard posts, live journals. And increasingly, those past selves have become liabilities.

Over the past few weeks, the act of cleaning up your past tweets has become simultaneously more popular and more suspect. Even non-celebrities want to prevent enemie sfr om scrolling through their history. Others are promoting the idea that anyone who deletes their Twitter histories must have something to hide.

But by 2018, we should know thatat weet is simp ly too easy to take out of context — and there’s no reason to keep a full accounting of everything you’ve ever tweeted. So here’s a guide to get tingridofit.

Download your archive

Before erasing your tweets, you can save a copy of everything you’ve ever tweeted — should youw ant a record before it’s all gone. I’ve never looked at mine, but it makes me feel better knowing it’s there. Here’s now to do it:

■ Go i ntoyouracco unt settings.

■ Click the “Your Twitter data” tab.

■ Scroll to the bottom and press the “Request data” button next to your Twitter and/or Periscope archives.

Twitter will eventually email you a big zip file containing your entire archive of tweets to the email address it has on file for you.

Start deleting

Sure, you could manually go through your tweets one by one and delete them, if you have infinite time. I use TweetDelete, a free service that I chose for its ease of use, privacy policy and recommendation from smarter friends.

TweetDelete lets you wipe up to 3,200 tweets at a time, and you can choose the length of your recent Twitter archive that you want to keep. The first time I ran TweetDelete,I set it to delete anything older than one year, for instance. (You can al sodeleteyour whole history.) All you do is sign in with your account and give the site permission to get to work.

Keep deleting

Another thing I like about TweetDe leteisthatitcan delete your content on a rolling basis. You can set up the rolling delete during your last run through TweetDelete’s archive cleanup. TweetDelete will check in with your account every few days and delete anything above whatever time limit you set.

Know deletion’s limits

Deleting your tweets won’t necessarily erase the entire record of everything you’ve ever said on the platform. I’ve used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in my reporting to access longdeleted tweets from Roseanne Barr’s account and to examine the history of suspicious, viral accounts. However, the Wayback Machine’s archives are somewhat random and incomplete, showing on lyth e last few tweets from each moment it crawled the account’s page.

Be aware that someone could screenshot your past tweets or embed them in a blog post.

There is a simpler way

Just delete your account altogether.