You may have seen my article on Monday about Power Delete Suite which can help you scrub your old Reddit posts and comments, now, I’m going to share another tool called Semiphemeral that can help you delete your old tweets and likes from Twitter. The tool is very customizable and, once set up, can be left to delete old content based on the settings you select.
To get started with Semiphemeral, just head over to the project’s website and press Login with Twitter at the top of the page. Do note that if you follow “prominent racists, misogynists, antisemites, homophobes, neo-Nazis, and other fascists”, then the website could ban you from using its services.
When logging in, you will have to give Semiphemeral authorization so that it can delete content for you. If you’re happy with the permissions, just tap Authorize app. Once logged in, head to the Settings tab to choose what to delete. Under Delete old tweets, you can select the duration tweets should remain available and make exceptions for popular tweets or those that are part of a thread. The second portion of the settings lets you unretweet and unlike tweets that are older than a certain number of days.
Keep in mind that anybody can go on your Twitter profile and see all the content that you’ve liked from the Like tab. As the Like tab is a tucked away, you may have thought the content that you’ve been liking was fairly private, but this isn’t the case. Using Semiphemeral can help you in this regard by unliking older posts.
Due to Twitter’s API limitations, the first time you use Semiphemeral, it may not delete all of your tweets as it’s limited to about 3,000 tweets. You can overcome this by ticking Force Semiphemeral to download all of my tweets again next time, instead of just the newest ones > pressing Save > Pause Semiphemeral in the Dashboard tab > then pressing Start Semiphemeral. You may have to run through this sequence a number of time before you manage to wipe all the tweets you want gone.
After the initial clean up process, Semiphemeral will remain active removing old tweets according to your preferences until you revoke the app’s permissions. To revoke its access, head over to Twitter, then go to More (three dot button) > Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Security and account access > Apps and sessions > Connected apps > Semiphemeral.com > Revoke app permissions.
The main draw of Semiphemeral is to delete public-facing content, however, you can give the app access to your direct messages to clean those up too but keep in mind that the recipient will still have a copy of the contents. In the Semiphemeral Export tab, you also have the option to back up your content to a CSV file if you want to keep posts for whatever reason.
One final thing to note about Semiphemeral is that once you activate it, you will receive a couple of direct messages from the Semiphemeral bot. These are nothing to worry about as they are just reporting some statistics about what the app has scanned, there will also be a message asking you to consider contributing money to help with the costs of running the service.
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