TweetDelete – Automatically delete your posts that are older than a maximum age | Hacker News Reader

TweetDelete – Automatically delete your posts that are older than a maximum age

tweetdelete.net

Services such as this cannot delete a tweet from other services or people who archive them or even just take a screenshot. You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.

As someone whose current Twitter account was created around 2013, only 1.9% of my 2248 tweets appear in Google thanks to archiving around once every 24 hours, that includes hits due to archiving by third party services. Meanwhile regular people can read my account without having to follow.

That's a 98.1% reduction in one big source of potential HR-related hiring showdowns.

There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

> There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

Are they greater than the benefits of simply never tweeting at all?

Naturally. If you treat twitter as the service it started as (a microblogging service) then being able to share those short updates while they are relevant, and have them deleted once their applicability expires, keeps things nice and clean without having to give up a voice.

That’s like making the argument for abstinence vs. birth control. Yes, the only 100% solution is not to ever post anything publicly. But there is still value in making things more private/less permanently persistent for the people who still choose to post.

Since you can delete posts through most services, even not posting anything isn't 100%.

For instance: I notice that you deleted this tweet. Interesting choice of avatar by the way.

https://i.imgur.com/0R4Xn6O.png

>That’s like making the argument for abstinence vs. birth control.

This isn't birth control. This is going, "What? There's no way this could be my kid!" on Maury.

It’s probably unfair to compare one of many means of communication online with a singular activity burned into the fabric of our genetic ancestry for hundreds of millions of years. Or: it’s like saying you shouldn’t eat bacon, not that you shouldn’t eat at all.

It depends on the benefits the individual gets from still using Twitter.

> You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.

That's generally a good assumption to make, it's definitely the case for HN. But finding someone's old tweets is orders of magnitudes easier via Twitter's advanced search, than to try to retroactively find them via Google and hope one of the disparate social-media-mirroring sites have captured them. Even Internet Archive will only have a spotty record of someone's timeline -- and IA won't capture the /with_replies endpoint since that requires being logged in.

I never trust any screenshot. Way too easy to fake.

Weird coincidence, that's just what NASA just tweeted:

https://imgur.com/a/cHES1

Since they are an agency of the government, can one ask to get a tweet pulled out as a stamped and verified document?

The federal government has policies that govern retention of social media:

https://records-express.blogs.archives.gov/2017/01/27/record...

> Bulletin 2014-02 informs agencies that content created on social media platforms, including Twitter, is likely to be a Federal record and must be managed appropriately. For records posted on third-party social media platforms, agencies must determine how best to manage the records for the appropriate retention period and capture them where appropriate. Some social media records may be temporary, with a transitory, short, or long-term retention. However, some dispositions may be permanent, requiring the records to be preserved until their eventual transfer to the National Archives.

Nice thanks

No idea what rights you'd have in the US, I'm not a citizen :-)

This screenshot of a NASA tweet is fake

You know that because it is a recent tweet.

Now imagine someone deletes all their old tweets programmatically. Several people have screenshots of an "old" tweet as they allegedly saw and "saved". Who do you believe?

https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/22ea282...

I don’t see that it would make any difference whether they systematically delete there tweets or not. You could still claim it’s missing due to being specifically deleted.

You can’t prove someone didn’t tweet something, but you can prove they did tweet something - if the tweet hasn’t been deleted, which is the common case for people who don’t systematically delete their tweets.

Sure, I thought that was obvious.

In Chrome: right-click, inspect. Edit page source. Done. Less than two minutes, and you don't need to have a tech background to do it.

Never trust screenshots.

Maybe they just want you to think it's a weird coincidence.

;)

By the way, official users of the Twitter firehose are required to honor tweet deletes. So while it is certainly the case that some kinds of archives (based on scrapers or screenshots or whatever) will keep tweets forever, other kinds do not.

Does twitter provide a stream of deleted tweets to tell them what to remove? Now that would be very interesting data to look at.

They apparently do, and indeed it would be far more interesting than the rest of the firehose! Especially for politicians and the like, it would label tweets with examining. Most would be typos, the rest could be gold.

Very true. Once it's out there, content can't be deleted.

Can't see any type of benefit to these services, besides for those who wish to automate their tasks.

The benefit is risk reduction, not absolutism. You make it hard for lazy people with a bone to pick to find your old Tweets. You also increase the ambiguity (was this screenshot faked?) and costs for someone trying to uncover old Tweets at scale.

Yeah, just got to think about it as like a bike lock. It won't stop dedicated attackers or the government, but it stops opportunists and by putting it slightly above the rest of the low hanging fruit.

Today’s lazy person is tomorrow’s AI task that’s trivial and universally applied. When publishing to the net, think of your future.

Some may engage in absurd tweet storms, followed by tweetdelete.net delete loops, intentionally, to ensure their own demise, for one reason or another. They may want things to be permanently documented in the very system that is complicit in their demise, so as to ensure that they would "never get another job in this town again".

Simultaneously, this may be a cry for help, something far beyond simply asking for mental help.

Of course widespread use of this will mean tweets are less useful. You won't be able to find that book/movie that somebody talked about or their great analysis of some topic. ie also on the front page today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727319

which links to a series of tweets, the top comment in HN is:

"I'm the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days."

Thanks to the quality of Twitter's search, I already can't find that book/movie that somebody talked about unless I liked/retweeted it. It's actually pretty frustrating: I remember seeing something in my Twitter feed, I want to show it to somebody, and I simply can't find it again even if I just saw it a day ago...

I've seldom seen any tweet carry information for longer than a few days. The combination of the messages being small, threads being hard to read, and tweets being hard to search makes them an atrociously bad medium to store information.

It's kinda like IRC discussions but almost worse. It's a shame because there's a lot of information stored in there... it's just not accessible.

they're useful in gauging public responses to events or products, and old ones can be particularly useful to see how something was viewed in its time.

you can get pretty fancy with date range searches at https://twitter.com/search-advanced

I use it to read the pulse on all sorts of things all the time. I even have 't' set as an address bar hotkey trigger for https://twitter.com/search?q=%s on every browser that supports the functionality.

Linking to these tweets is already a bad idea because often tweets get deleted or the twitter website is just terrible.

I think that widespread use of this would bring to an opposite "tweetkeep" or enhancements to Wayback Machine

A while ago, I created a very simple set of Python scripts to accomplish precisely this, if you'd rather use something you actually control. Here: https://github.com/rinze/obliterate_tweets

This is what I'm using for the past year or so, running daily as a cronjob: https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/TwitterDeleteMost

You can whitelist specific tweets to keep, and set a threshold for favorites or retweets above which the tweets are preserved. For example, if you tweet something and ten people retweet it, the script will save it forever. If you tweet something that no one retweets or favorites, it's gone after 30 days. I call it a 'socially curated' feed, since old tweets are basically worthless to anyone but strangers wanting to profile you.

And props to Mike McQuaid over on GitHub for originally creating this tool, and for helping me adapt it to my use-case.

Awesome! I used Mike's original tool a few years back, got rid of a lot of my twitter. Probably time to do it again with your fork :)

I wrote a JS based tweet curator to do this on a manual rather than automated basis. Mostly to keep the responsibility for dumb accidental deletion "on me". https://github.com/Pomax/Twitter-Personal-Feed-Curator

Thank you, I was just going to ask for something like this.

The way I use Twitter is to download tweets to a local database, including images/videos/unshortened URL and then I view the data in my own UI from local DB.

It circumvents the tweet/account removals done by users or Twitter. Also I can do any kind of search/data processing I want.

I guess I'm not alone. You can't hide your data once they are made public.

It's interesting what is possible once you start treating web services as a data source. Sometimes there is much more exposed than is visible or easily consumable on the page and you can filter/search/consume the way you want without all the clutter/feeding algorithms around the original page/service.

How many petabytes does something like this take up?

I download profiles I'm interested in of course. Not everything. 70 profiles with 75000 tweets take 5GB for JSON + images + linked pages content + 60GB for videos.

I didn't optimize for space at all, twitter's json is quite wasteful.

The internet says there are about 500 million tweets per day. If we assume 500 bytes for storing each, this would be 250 Gigabytes per day.

Average tweet JSON object size is 5300B.

Should compress nicely though.

For people who use Reddit, deleted comments only remove the username and not the content, making it trivial to trace back the original poster. If you delete posts/comments regularly use Shreddit which overwrites the content before deleting it making this trace back much more difficult.

https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

> deleted comments only remove the username and not the content

Source?

I just tried posting something and deleting it for myself. I don't even see '[deleted]' or anything in the thread. It's just gone completely. The permalink says "there doesn't seem to be anything here" (like it does for empty threads or subreddits). No mention of my username nor the content anywhere that I can find.

It's been a while since I've checked so I may be wrong on this, but deleting your reddit account will remove the username while preserving the content. Deleting your comment without deleting your account will preserve both.

Reddit internally saves post deletions but not post edits, so if you really want to delete something you should edit it to some nonsense before you delete it.

Of course, the best way to protect yourself is to never post anything compromising in the first place because there are already a lot of services out there that cache everything, but I think it's a good practice to follow if you're going to delete anyway.

> deleting your reddit account

Ah, that's something completely different.

You're both half-right.

Comments that are deleted (either self-deleted, removed by a mod/admin, or deleted from account deletion) will disappear as long as no one replied to it. This behavior is the same, no matter how the comment gets deleted.

If the comment has at least one reply, then the username will become [deleted] (or [removed]), but the comment/content will remain.

>If the comment has at least one reply, then the username will become [deleted] (or [removed]), but the comment/content will remain.

That's false. Both the content and the username will be replaced by [deleted] if the user (or a mod) asked for the comment to be deleted, and it had at least 1 reply.

Here's a test I just did:

https://www.reddit.com/r/television+none/comments/88rd9e/net...

This is false for comments... it is true for posts however.

Also, reddit once said that they only keep the latest version of a comment in their database (not sure if it is still true though).... so if you want to really delete a comment from reddit, you have to edit it to some random text and then delete it.

It's false for posts as well, if it's a text post. The text of the post is deleted.

If it's a link post, then it isn't deleted.

It should be noted that deleting reddit posts is similar to Twitter in that multiple third-party services will probably retain the deleted content forever.

All this talk of deleting old content is necessary for privacy but it still makes me sad.

Imagine if something like twitter existed for the entire 21st century. Yeah, we have books and articles describing those times but they're almost always elite or intentionally elevated perspectives. I could see myself getting lost for days in historical tweets from regular people shitposting around the spanish-american war.

An item on my todo list for years has been to create a project that wipes your history on various social media services.

I haven't used TweetDelete yet, but a quick search shows there's many paid, free, and open source options available. This one stands out as being better since you can inspect the code and it also deletes favourites and direct messages: http://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/

And close to deleting 3 billion tweets so far.

Ive created some similar host-yourself FOSS options for Reddit and Disqus:

https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-reddit

https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-disqus

I honestly don’t see why I should have to trust a SaaS to maintain privacy data on another SaaS. That’s not solving the problem, but just moving the goalpost.

This seems like a good way to make twitter even more toxic than it already is. If you're afraid of your tweets coming back to haunt you later on, maybe you shouldn't be tweeting those things.

In the 1930’s, it became a crime (in a certain large country) to think that plants had genes that gave heritable traits. Thousands of scientists, biologists, agricultural researchers and others were imprisioned or executed for disagreeing or previously having held the wrong view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Sure, there a lot of evil and stupidity said on Twitter, and through human history. But not everyone who is punished for what they said was saying something wrong.

You never know when politically correct culture, which grows more intolerant and authoritarian by the day, will shift against something you said once on Twitter.

I dunno. I delete my tweets after a year. I do it not because I'm afraid of anything coming back to bite me but because I'm opposed to being perpetually archived. Some day I will die. I'd prefer not to leave any carelessly produced ghosts of myself behind, if I can help it.

Or maybe you just read.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-trolls-locked-m...

I think it could make it less toxic by allowing the long tail of users to delete things that may have come off-the-cuff, in a heated moment, or are simply cringeworthy when you look back on them.

I would recommend leaving 5 per month behind of neutral/boring tweets. If Twitter says account was created in March 2008 and your tweets start in 2016, somebody who's reviewing your feed might wonder what you're trying to hide.

The title of this post is a little incongruous with the linked content, which gives equal footing to data tidiness and privacy:

> TweetDelete is useful for people who want to reduce the amount of old data in their Twitter account (perhaps because of other apps they use on it) or people who want to limit the amount of data about themselves they expose online.

I think most of us will dismiss the privacy angle here, moderated as it is.

Thanks, we've reverted the title to a representative phrase from the page.

I set this up earlier, and of course it deleted my keybase twitter proof. Shame there's no option to exclude tweets matching certain patterns.

Crap, I just set this up today, and realize that I just now did the same thing..

I’ve been using this service for a few years now. I catch some flak about it from folks (deleting my tweets breaks threads). However, I love that there’s an option that works to do this. I’ve been on Twitter for nearly a decade. A lot of who I am has changed, also meaning my tweets have as well. It’s good to have a fresh start, which is very hard to get on most social media networks.

I use this, but have no expectation that it improves privacy for me or that it actually deletes anything. If something I type goes over the wire, it’s out of my control forever. Deleting my tweets is strictly a tool that I use to unburden my own self from things I was thinking about before.

I would like this to exist for Facebook, so I can clear everything except the current year.

Alas, it can't. Facebook doesn't let you delete things through the API.

Wow, that is awful.

I like this, been thinking similar. My current ideal solution is data retention cap, something reasonable like 7 years. Next people should have archiving tools and make use of fair use. This would give realistic view of what others may archive, help inform their online conduct. Screenshots are the best medium to archive tweets etc imo, captures as viewed.

I made a text-only ephemeral social network as a side project a while ago. It deletes messages after 24 hours, and warns if a screenshot is taken: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink/id1086509452?mt=8.

I use an iOS app called Xpire and do this somewhat manually (sort by oldest) while in the toilet etc. I only do so manually because I enjoy reading my old tweets one last time before deleting. Despite being on the service for 8+ years I only have about 6 months of old tweets available.

I'm going to go ahead and plug a script I made to do something similar (if you were to put it on a cron job I suppose): https://github.com/landaire/detweet

If you need privacy don't use taotfer or don't post stuff you will later regret.

If you need privacy then self censor?

One of the core reasons for privacy is to prevent censorship in all forms.

Or use different tools that are built for it.

Twitter is a public broadcast system, there is no privacy there.

Sure there is, you can publicly broadcast anonymous speech-- a cornerstone of free speech tradition.

Privacy != anonymity.

If you want your communications to be private, by definition you should not use a public broadcast system to do it. Twitter is also pseudo-anonymous at best.

How’s that? The tradition of free speech has been standing on a public square and announcing your views or attending a public meeting with officials to tell them how you feel about their policies. The concept of privacy itself is very young, and the idea of anonymous speech even younger. Can you point to some anonymous speech traditions in the US or elsewhere ?

Also, Twitter is not anonymous.

Another of the traditions of free speech is publishing under a pseudonym.

Yes. Everyone needs privacy, so everyone self censors. To what degree depends on your tolerance for risk.

You can use search to find your tweets that are not in your most recent 3,200.

I use this or something like it, I’ve been on twitter since 2010 I think and I’ve changed a lot since then. No point in keeping tweets around longer than they need to be

Here's a similar tool that I built for fun: http://www.deletehub.com/

back when I still tweeted at least two users blocked me since after a few weeks my tweets would delete and so their replies were neutered as well.

Change the name to avoid getting bothered by Twitter.

Why doesn't Twitter have this feature built-in?

the twitter community needs a service that deletes regrettable tweets, and anything that might one day cause a public relations nightmare

> anything that might one day cause a public relations nightmare

That category includes everything. Your post about how you're crushing some pancakes today could be considered a celliac-phobic statement punishable under the Freedom from Oppression and Tyrannical Online Speech Act passed in 2040.

Well, I'm not convinced that it includes everything, but I do agree with your general idea that it can be really hard to figure out what will be considered offensive in the future. That's why a service like this could be valuable.

It would even have value if it could just eliminate, say, 50% of future PR nightmares.

Unless someone screenshots your tweets. Either you have to create a private account and be really restrictive about who you add or what you say.

Screenshots can be faked, a service like archive.is is much more resilient.

I want this for my Facebook activity.

I deleted all my tweets once but still have a count of 3 tweets. Where are these shadow tweets, and how do I eliminate them??

That’s probably some incrementor in a DB that has fallen out of sync. At high scale it’s inefficient to run SELECT COUNT(*) for things like activity counts, and under normal use, being within 5 of the actual count when people often accumulate 10,000+ of an activity is acceptable.

What could trigger the incrementor to resync?

Probably done on a periodic basis, so, wait.

It’s been a year

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