Ephemera

There has always been a contradiction in social media technologies between the affordances of platforms in daily use, and the archival capacities available to the curious or belligerent. Users are encouraged and expected to joke, argue, and share every thought and action, in a ways that are often intimate and unguarded. And yet, with the cold logic of responsible system administration and a well-executed disaster recovery plan, every one of these utterances is recorded in an ever-expanding archive of the potentially-embarrassing, regretfully offensive, and highly contextual, mixing in a soup of tedium and TV spoilers. Inevitably, this public archive has been weaponised. The 2018 Victorian state election saw a rolling series of candidate resignations and dis-endorsements from nearly every party, as journalists and political operatives systematically scoured opponents' social media histories going back years, looking for anything potentially compromising. Some of what was found was legitimately revealing. Much of it was maliciously removed from its context, embarrassing but commonplace, or targeted at people who were not even running as candidates. Anyone and everything, it seemed, was considered fair game.

I'd had a sense of deep unease about this public archive of utterances well before the events of 2018, and have no intention of every running for public office, but it proved to be a catalyst for me to finally take action to try to make my ephemeral social media posts actually ephemeral (at least from a public archiving point of view - I have no illusions that Facebook ever really deleted all my data when I deleted my account, or that Twitter really deletes all my old tweets). Since around December 2018 I've been regularly deleting old tweets from Twitter and toots from Mastodon using some Python scripts. I've been asked a few times how this works, and recently made some updates to the Mastodon script, so if you would like to do the same thing, here's a brief guide.

Deleting tweets programatically

API keys

Prior to Twitter's July 2018 API changes it was pretty easy to just create a new 'app' in your Twitter account to obtain the API keys and tokens needed to interact with your account programatically. Unfortunately, in the name of "fighting abuse" (something Twitter and Jack Dorsey have repeatedly shown themselves to be both deeply uninterested in, and comically incompetent at), instead of banning Nazis Twitter instead continued their slow-rolling war on the independent developers who are largely responsible for its success.

Why am I giving you this history lesson? Mostly because I'm still annoyed, but also as background for why there is now a convoluted and opaque system where you have to register your app, fill in a form, wait an unspecified period of time for some tech-bro in San Francisco to 'review' your app, and then maybe get your API keys activated, before you will be able to delete your old tweets using the options below.

To delete old tweets using a script you need to obtain four special strings:

• consumer_key
• consumer_secret
• access_token
• access_token_secret

These become available by registering for a developer account and app at developer.twitter.com.

Deep cleaning

Before we can move to regularly deleting tweets of a certain age, we need to do the Twitter equivalent of a 'deep clean'. The Twitter Standard API will only go back around 6 months into the past (the exact time seems a little rubbery). To remove tweets older than this, we need to target the exact tweet IDs rather than simply search your tweet history. For this we need:

• your Twitter archive
• tweepy and
• Francois Lesueur's script

Depending on how big your archive is, the direction of the wind, and the weather in California, this can take anywhere between an hour and a week. Best to request it as the same time you request your developer account.

Once you have your archive and your API credentials, you can get down to business.

1. Create a new folder on your PC called tweet_delete
2. Copy the script into a new file in that folder, called delete_tweets.py.
3. Open the .zip archive from Twitter. There should be a folder at data/js/tweets. Copy this folder into your tweet_delete folder.
4. Open delete_tweets.py in a text editor (Notepad or TextEdit will do if you don't have a code editor)
5. Enter your Twitter credentials and period of time you want keep tw