# How I deleted all my old tweets using Python

> How I used Python and the delete-tweets tool to bulk-delete old tweets, from requesting my Twitter archive to setting API keys and clearing my history.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2021-01-12 | Topics: [Python](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/python/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/how-to-delete-old-tweets/

I don't like the idea of leaving around too many "historical" tweets with all the dumb things I tweet about.

So I decided to delete them all.

To do so I requested an archive of all my tweets on Twitter, from the Twitter settings.

The archive can take days to generate. My archive dated back to 2015, although I use Twitter since 2007. Maybe I already removed my past tweets in 2015, I don't remember.

I got the archive, I downloaded it, then I unpacked the folder and I ran

```python
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate.fish
python -m pip install delete-tweets
```

Then I created the environment variables to set the keys of a Twitter app, required to run the whole process, as described on <https://github.com/koenrh/delete-tweets>:

```
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="your_consumer_key"
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="your_consumer_secret"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="your_access_token"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET="your_access_token_secret"
```

I used the consumer and access keys of a Twitter app I already had (Twitter now has a process to create new apps, so you must be reviewed and approved to do the same if you don't have an app already there).

> Tip: when you define environment variables in this way, they are recorded by default in the shell history. To avoid that with the Fish shell, run a new shell with `fish --private` to start the shell in private mode.

Then I ran:

```python
delete-tweets --until 2021-01-01 tweet.js
```

to delete all the tweets I tweeted before 2021. It took a little while, but it worked.

![Terminal output showing delete-tweets command deleting multiple tweets with final count of 12009 deleted tweets](https://flaviocopes.com/images/how-to-delete-old-tweets/Screen_Shot_2021-01-10_at_17.38.13.png)

It took way more to get the archive from Twitter than to delete the tweets, but in the end I got a clean slate.