Twitter Deleter

A simple Python script for bulk deleting tweets

Prerequisites

• A Twitter Developer Account. To get one, go here.
  Note: it could take up to a month before your Developer Account gets created.
• Twitter Archive. If you're planning on deleting more than your last 3,200 tweets, then you'll need your account's archive. Learn how to get it here.
  Note: it takes a day to get the archive ready, and it's a really big zip file containing all your Twitter data.

Getting Started

• Now that you have both, all you have to do is create a Twitter API app here if you don't already have one.
• After that, create the neccesary access tokens and client tokens in your Developer portal.
• Unzip your Twitter Archive, go to data and open tweets.js. It is a JavaScript file and can't be read if you're using Python, you'll have to change the tweets variable to json by surrounding it with double quotes, changing the equals sign to a colon and enclosing the entire file in curly braces.

// Before
tweets = [{...allTheTweets}] // The array contains all tweet objects

// After
{"tweets" : [{...allTheTweets}]}
// Then rename the file to tweets.json

• Install requests, requests-oauthlib and python-dotenv with pip.
  pip install requests requests-oauthlib

Using the Python Script

Everything is set, now place tweets.json in the same folder as the Python Script, and call it with
python deleter for Windows
or
python3 deleter for Linux/Mac.

The script creates a log.txt file that helps you note what index you stopped at, in a case where the script crashes.

You can now look up what error caused it to crash, and use the last known index as the starting point the next time you're calling the script like so
python deleter <start number>
or
python3 deleter <start number>
where start number is the last known index.

Debugging

It is very unlikely that the program will crash due to any error unless things aren't setup right but in the event that it does, check the log file for the last line, it should contain an error, but if it doesn't, you can use the little piece of code at the end of the file to test for specific indexes around the last recorded index in log.txt, when you find the index giving the unknown error, you can skip it and use the next index as the start number. If the last recorded index was, say 1250, you can edit the code to log in multiples of 5 rather than 50 to narrow down the error-catching index.

When you're sure of the index giving the errors, i.e 1262, you skip it and call script with the next index like so:
python deleter 1263
or python3 deleter 1263
And everything should work fine.

Contact me on Twitter if anything is unclear.
Thank you.