Oct 6, 2016

Hi Section 80 friends, I have a question for people smarter than me regarding the internet

I've had my Twitter account private for years. I've always kept it private because I wanted to be able to tweet funny, sometimes offensive things without any consequences. Particularly since many companies look into your social media presence these days, I thought it was worth it to keep it locked up.

Nowadays I think I'm past the days of needing to send offensive tweets tbh, and I would like to make my account public. But then there is, of course, the Trevor Noah problem - that my old tweets can be dug up from when I was private and young and immature (keep in mind of course that I am much funnier than Trevor Noah) and used against me.

So I see a couple of paths here

1) Say f--- it, not worth the trouble, just leave it private.
PROS - No work involved
CONS - I'm still private - not my preference, kinda defeats the purpose of Twitter in some ways

2) Go through and delete selected tweets
PROS - I'll know those tweets are gone
CONS - Time consuming (I have 3,000+ of them to go through)

3) Delete *all* tweets
PROS - Not time consuming at all
CONS - I lose all my old tweets which I don't necessarily want (some were real gems, tbh)

4) Start over with a new account
PROS - No worries about having to deal with my old tweets
CONS - Having to start all over with followers/people I follow/old saved favorites, etc.

Lately my inclination has been #2 - just go through and make sure there's nothing offensive to be found. But I've always been told "Nothing is ever REALLY deleted off the internet!!" without rly knowing what that even means lol...so that leaves me a bit uneasy too.

Anyone have similar issues? Thoughts? I understand I'm overcomplicating this a bit, just want to hear some different perspectives

 

Oct 6, 2016

There's a program you can use that will delete thousands of tweets for you, let me find it.

 

Oct 6, 2016

I went through the same thing a few months back. I wanted to take mine off of private but I know I had a lot of questionable things on there so I ended up using this program, it worked great, deleted over 10k tweets for me. You have to request your archive from Twitter and then put it in the program.

With that archive, you can always reload it back into this program and look at all those old tweets that would have been deleted.

http://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/

@Swizz

 

Oct 6, 2016

Nice, thank you for this sir

I'm at work right now and can't look into this as the site seems to be blocked, but just to verify - this is a permanent delete (meaning they won't be able to be found in a search), and it's also a mass delete (meaning ALL tweets will be deleted)?

 

Oct 6, 2016

You can mass delete or you can choose to delete all tweets before a certain date. As far as I know, it is a permanent delete but I can't be 100% sure. I would look into that when you can if you're worried about that.

 

Oct 6, 2016

Thanks man, I'll look into it! Sounding like a good option for me

 

Oct 6, 2016

TweetDelete bruh

also agreed you should make your account public especially as you're emerging as a public figure

 

Oct 6, 2016

yeah household names like me shouldn't have private accounts

I'll look into this option as well!