Thursday, March 18, 2021

Deleting Tweets and Other Social Media Content

Jesse Squires:

I have been periodically deleting my tweets for a while now. Yesterday, I finally found a reliable solution for deleting my Twitter “likes” as well and I spent some time deleting all of them. Long ago, I also deleted all of my content on Facebook and Instagram. If you are interested in purging your social media accounts, here are some options.

[…]

Regardless of whether or not I choose to continue using these platforms in the future, I prefer to retain the accounts for historical reasons and leave them vacant — at least for now. This is similar to what I did when I got off of LinkedIn. This preserves (at least the shell of) my online “identity” and prevents someone else from taking the usernames that I used for so many years.

[…]

Twitter remains valuable to me for now. I use it almost entirely for interacting with the developer community. In my experience, it is a great way to help others or get help from others — diagnosing bugs, sharing development tips, etc. However, I do not need a private company to maintain a public record of everything I have ever typed[…]

Update (2021-03-22): Semiphemeral:

There are plenty of tools that let you make your Twitter feed ephemeral, automatically deleting tweets older than some threshold, like one month.

Semiphemeral does this, but also lets you automatically exclude tweets based on criteria: how many RTs or likes they have, and if they’re part of a thread where one of your tweets has that many RTs or likes. It also lets you manually select tweets you’d like to exclude from deleting.

It delete all of your old likes, even really old ones that Twitter makes difficult to delete. And it can automatically delete your old direct messages.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

I’ve tried deleting my likes as Squires suggests, and it notified every single person that I liked their tweet. Very odd, so I stopped.

Beatrix Willius

If you don't want to use Twitter, Facebook etc. then don't use it. But posting and deleting is useless.

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