How to Bulk Erase Old Tweets or Tweets Containing Specific Words

From time to time, you may have to clear your old posts on Twitter to remove any obsolete information. Business houses, for instance, may need to clear their old tweets to remove any outdated product information or promotion campaigns. This is also necessary if you had posted some undesirable series of tweets earlier, or want to erase tweets that contain a certain word or phrase.

With thousands of tweets on your Twitter timeline, manually deleting tweets that were posted on a certain month is a tedious job using Twitter’s interface. Although Twitter lacks the feature to mass erase your tweets, it makes available the platform for third-party developers to create apps that can search or delete tweets programmatically.

Twitter Archive Eraser is a 100% Free & Open Source tool that can erase thousands of your tweets, DMs and Favorites (“Likes”) automatically. Twitter Archive Eraser is completely free and has no trial period or limits unlike other tweet erasers on the web. The source code is available on GitHub. The app has no access to your password. All you need to is provide the app permissions to access your Twitter account.

Bulk erase old tweets or tweets containing specific words

First, request your Twitter archive via Twitter Settings. And download your tweet archive (.zip) from your mail.

Download Martani’s Twitter Archive Eraser and run it. Next, authenticate or authorize Martani Archive Eraser to use your account. As seen from the authorization window, this application will be able to:

• Read Tweets from your timeline.
• See who you follow, and follow new people.
• Update your profile.
• Post Tweets for you.

Will not be able to:

• Access your direct messages*
• See your email address.
• See your Twitter password.

*The app can access your direct messages only if you explicitly enable the option “I want to delete Direct Messages (DMs)” in the initial screen.

Note: The URL on the address bar is a secure (https) Twitter website asking you to authorize the application to use your account. If you’re not already logged in to your account, you will need to log in. As a general precautionary measure, when connecting any third-party app to your Twitter account, be sure check that the authorization page is secure by verifying if the URL starts with https://twitter.com. Only if the page is secure and the URL is twitter.com, enter your username and password and click Sign In to connect the application.

After authorizing, you’ll be provided a PIN which you’ll need to enter in Twitter Archive Eraser’s Sign in screen next screen. Next, choose which item (Tweet, DMs, Likes or Favorites) you want to delete.

Load your twitter archive which you downloaded in step 1. Click Next.

Select all or specific months from the list and click Next. I’ve chosen to delete tweets made before than October 2017. In the next screen, you can filter items accordingly. You can search for a specific word or phrase and only delete those entries. To delete all the entries in the chosen month(s), clear your search by clicking Show all / Reset Filter.

Your old tweets are being cleared right now and believe me, it is a super fast operation. The developer claims that the tool can erase up to 2000 tweets per minute, using up to 32 concurrent threads simultaneously.

Once the job is done, open your Twitter App Settings and revoke access to the program.

Unlike other tweet eraser web apps, Twitter Archive Eraser (at least the version which I tested) doesn’t automatically post (unwanted messages such as “I’ve deleted my old tweets using <program>”) on your Twitter timeline without asking you first, although the app has permissions to post tweets on your account.