I deleted all my tweets
I had a complicated relationship with Twitter (now X).
I wasted a lot of time there, got into some embarrassing arguments, and wrote things I now regret. But it’s also where I met friends and partners, started my career in cultural heritage, and began my queer awakening. Maybe one day I’ll write a longer article about what Twitter meant to me.
I haven’t been active on Twitter for several years, and I finally decided to remove all my old tweets. I used TweetDeleter.com to get rid of them. I’ll post one final tweet linking to this article and telling my followers where else to find me on the web, but after that I’m done with Twitter.
Why?
I felt like I was getting very little benefit to leaving my old tweets up, but I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it.
- I don’t think many people were reading them and getting something useful out of it.
- I kept getting notifications from people who’d found an old tweet, and wanted to start an argument or hurl abuse in my direction. I can do without that.
- My tweets are an increasingly outdated representation of how I think and feel. I haven’t tweeted in over two years, so anything I’ve learnt in that time isn’t represented there. They felt like a liability; something that could be used to criticise me for a view I no longer hold.
I already purged my tweets once – at some point, I deleted all my tweets from before 2017, because they had a lot of personal stuff I no longer wanted to be publicly available. Absolutely nobody noticed or cared when I did that, and I think this time will be much the same.
A lot of people deleted their Twitter/X accounts in November because of a Terms of Service update that would allow X to use their posts to train AI models. While I understand the concern, that wasn’t a big motivation for me. Anything that’s publicly available on the web has already been used for AI training, including my writing and my tweets. I can’t fix that.
I considered deleting my entire account, but I wanted to leave it up as a signpost to where I’m writing and posting now. I don’t think there’s much risk in having an account that just says “no longer here, go over there”.
How?
I had about 35,000 tweets.
I experimented with a few DIY automations for deleting lots of tweets, but I couldn’t get anything working quickly. Instead, I decided to pay $7.99 for one month of TweetDeleter.com’s Unlimited plan. A couple of friends had already used the site to delete their old tweets, and I didn’t want to spend much time on this.
I had to upload a copy of my Twitter archive so they knew what to delete, and then it took about a week to delete everything.
Interestingly, X says that I still have 407 posts, but you can’t see any on my profile:
I think these are probably retweets of posts that are no longer accessible to me – the original poster has either blocked me, or made their account private. I don’t think I can do anything about these “ghost posts”, and I’m not too worried about them.
What’s next?
I’m going to post a link to this article on Twitter, and then log out for the last time.
I haven’t found a good replacement – although I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, neither of them feel like the best days I had on Twitter. It took a long time to create that circle of friends, and I don’t have the energy to try to replicate that on a new service.
I joined Twitter in August 2009 and a lot of good things came out of it, but after fifteen years, it feels like that era of my life is over.