Mastering the Art of Tidying Up Your Twitter Past

One great thing about Twitter is that you can easily scroll back through your tweets over the years. However, this can also be a downside, especially for its vast user base of over 330 million active monthly users, including 68 million from the U.S. Once posted, tweets have a long lifespan.

If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, chances are your opinions, endorsements, or likes have changed. For business owners, remember that old tweets can still represent your brand, even if they were posted years ago.

If you want to clean up your Twitter history—whether it’s deleting a few tweets, your entire Twitter history, or even your entire account—you have options.

Before starting, think about downloading your current Twitter archive. To do this, go to account settings and scroll to “Request your archive.” You’ll receive an email with the zip file, which you can view with an HTML file viewer.

It’s important to note that deleting a tweet only removes it from your account, your followers’ timelines, and Twitter search results. Any retweets of your deleted tweet will also be removed. However, if someone quoted your tweet in their retweet, their tweet will not be deleted. Additionally, cached tweets, screenshots, or tweets featured elsewhere online may still exist.

Removing individual tweets is pretty simple. Just log into Twitter, find the tweet you want to delete, click the arrow on the right side of the tweet, and then click “Delete Tweet.”

If you can’t find a specific tweet, try using advanced search. Enter your search term in the search bar and hit enter. When you see the search results, click “Search Filters” and then “Advanced Search.” Under the People heading, enter your own Twitter profile in the “From these accounts” box. This will give you a list of relevant results to browse.

For a complete clean slate, there are several services to delete your entire history. Free options include Cardigan and TweetDelete, while paid services like Tweet Deleter and Tweet Eraser offer more features and customer support.

Keep in mind that Twitter’s API limits access to the last 3,200 tweets. Complete deletion services may require you to upload your tweet archive or do multiple passes, depending on how many tweets you have.

If you don’t care about keeping your followers, lists, or likes, you can reset your account using a username swap. Open your existing account in one browser tab and a new incognito window to create a temporary new Twitter account. Change your current username to something else, then switch to the new account and change its username to your original one. This way, the old account gets a new name, and the fresh account has your original username but no tweets.

Just don’t delay during this process. If someone else grabs your username before you finish, you’ll lose it. Also, it’s best to delete or strip down your old account to avoid any lingering associations with your previous tweets.