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 0sSweeeeeet
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.