Deleting Thousands of Tweets with Redact!

For any users who have tens of thousands of tweets, Twitter can be stubborn when it comes to fully removing everything. In most cases, this appears to manifest as a slight graphical glitch, displaying an incorrect number. Here’s an example.

This is a user who used Redact to mass remove every single tweet. There isn’t anything visible on their profile when you visit it. Despite this, when they link their profile in Discord, it displays the massive number you see above.

This seems harmless at first; however, the problem becomes more concerning when we take another look at the Redact client.

If you tell Redact to delete all your tweets again, it strangely can show a few thousand of them to you again, and then seems to delete them for a second time. This indicates that they’re still floating around somewhere, accessible by somebody under circumstances that we don’t entirely understand.

The Solution

The Redact Team takes this issue very seriously, and we’ve come up with a plan to make sure you’re as safe and secure as possible.

We recommend that you use the scheduler to set up a full deletion once every week until all your tweets are totally and completely gone. If you’re not familiar with the scheduler, we’ll give a crash course here.

When you go to delete things with Redact, there are three big buttons at the very bottom below all the settings. You’ll see Preview Mode, Deletion Mode, and Add to Scheduler.

When you click Add to Scheduler, you’ll see a couple options. You want to input “7” in the box to set it to run every seven days. It should look something like this.

Once you input these numbers, click Schedule Deletion at the bottom, and then sit back and relax! Redact will handle the rest. Any settings you put will also automatically apply, so if you want to schedule a targeted regular deletion, this tool is more than capable of that.

Here’s a graph to show what will happen once the user we talked about earlier sets up the scheduler in the way we described. The total number of half-deleted tweets goes down by 3,000 week by week, until the end where there aren’t actually enough to remove a full batch.

Easy, but Time Consuming

While this is, unfortunately, a somewhat lengthy process, it is also an extremely uninvolved one. You won’t have to constantly check in on your Twitter account or the Redact client at any point.

After a few weeks, your Twitter will be totally squeaky clean! With barely having lifted a finger, you won’t have to worry about any lingering footprints left in hidden corners. The fresh start on Twitter that you’re looking for is finally complete!

If you have any lingering questions, please feel free to pop over to redact.dev/discord and poke a developer with your problem!