naive-delete.py

A script to quickly use the data/tweets.js file from your Twitter personal data archive to delete your tweets.

Prerequisites

1. You have used the Twitter Developer console to create:
   • An app with read/write permissions
   • OAuth v1 consumer keys
   • User tokens for yourself
2. You have downloaded your Twitter personal data archive, and it contains data/tweets.js

Installation

1. Clone this repository

2. Use the tools of your choice to install the packages in requirements.txt.

3. Set up environment variables

   • (Recommended) Create a .env file with the following contents:

   TW_CONSUMER_KEY=YourAppConsumerKey
   TW_CONSUMER_SECRET=YourAppConsumerSecret
   TW_ACCESS_TOKEN=YourAccountAccessToken
   TW_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=YourAccountAccessTokenSecret

   • (Alternative) Set the above as actual environment variables.

Usage

naive-delete.py [-h] [--seek SEEK] [--logging {DEBUG,INFO,WARN,ERROR}] [infile]

Options

• -h, --help: show this help message and exit
• --seek SEEK: Number of tweets to skip ahead
• --logging {DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR}: Logging verbosity level

Positional arguments

• infile: path to tweets.js; read STDIN if omitted.

Fairly Anticipated Questions

1. Why another tweet delete utility?
   • I participated in a really long thread that was confusing Semiphemeral as it tried to traverse up the thread, so I wanted to throw together something naive on my own.
   • I didn't look into other options before just coding.
2. How does it perform?
   • Running it on a Celeron laptop on home wi-fi, I was getting about 2 deletes per second.
   • I deleted about 11,000 tweets and it missed maybe three three old retweets.
3. Why does the code warn, but continue, on Forbidden or Not Found tweets?
   • The archive had some retweets that had either since been deleted, or the poster's account had been suspended or went private. So I couldn't interact with them via API.
4. I have an idea, will you accept a pull request?
   • Sure! But, I don't have any more tweets to delete, so I don't expect to test this a ton more.

Dependencies

• Tweepy to wrap the Twitter API and OAuth
• json-stream to parse JSON without reading the whole file into memory
• python-dotenv to store API keys and secrets outside the source code