Frequently Asked Questions

TweetEraser is useful for people who'd like to limit the amount of data they expose about themselves online. Some specific examples where TweetEraser could be handy: -

• To prevent a new employer seeing something regrettable that you said on Twitter a couple of years ago.
• To remove references to an old partner after starting a new relationship.
• To repurpose an existing Twitter account (e.g. for business use instead of personal) and remove everything in it.

We've been operating since October 2011. The current website launched in June 2019, bringing a complete redesign and numerous new features and improvements.

If you have any automatic tasks active there will be a button to turn them off on your Tasks page. Other types of task only run once, so don't need to be turned off.

You can alternatively revoke permissions for TweetEraser.

You can revoke permissions for TweetEraser on Twitter's application settings page. This makes it impossible for TweetEraser to access your Twitter account unless you sign in to our site and reauthorise it.

We suggest doing the same for any others apps you no longer need in order to increase your Twitter account's privacy and security.

[This is a premium feature]
Yes, you can upload your Twitter data file for us to process, which allows you to delete any number of old tweets. See the upload instructions for more details on how this works.

Yes, just choose "Run this task: Automatically every few days" when starting a tweet deletion task. We'll then automatically start deletion tasks for you with the same settings every 3 days (this may vary based on service load).

Your "Tasks" page will show details on any active automatic task and provide an option to stop it. You can also see the results from any recent executions there.

• You should pick an age limit shorter than the time it takes you to post 3,200 tweets for automatic mode to work effectively (due to the first point here).
• Because we process automatic tasks every 3 days, expect to see tweets up to 3 days older than the deletion age you picked in your feed (e.g. if you picked "two weeks", then up to 17 days old).

If you're a non-premium user, you must sign in to our site at least once every 6 months to keep your automatic tasks active. This is to ensure we're only providing this service to people who still want it, and to prevent the number of automatic tasks we need to process becoming unsustainable over time.

[This is a premium feature intended for more advanced users]
Yes. If TweetEraser doesn't have an option for what you want, you can pass in the numeric IDs of specific tweets for us to delete. See the advanced mode instructions.

We have several different premium plans you can choose from. These plans give you access to our advanced features and makes deleting your tweets a lot easier. Our lowest plan starts at only $3.99/mo!

Visit our premium page for more details or to purchase.

No. Premium status is based on your Twitter account, so if you want to use these features on multiple accounts, you will need to pay to upgrade each one.

To cancel your premium subscription, simply go to our account settings page. From there you can see which subscription you are subscribed to and click the cancel button.

Yes. We treat these exactly the same as other tweets, so they will be deleted if they match the age and/or keyword you specified. The same limitations also apply, so we might only be able to access the older ones after processing your data file.

This is nearly always due to one of the bullet points mentioned in limitations of TweetEraser.

Twitter's timeline/home page only shows recent tweets, so if you delete all of your most recent 3,200 tweets, it will appear empty. The number on the counter is correct - these tweets still exist and may appear in search results or on other pages. For example the "media" page seems to work differently and can show tweets of any age.

You can get an accurate list of the tweets remaining in your account from your Twitter data file.

There are certain specific circumstances where tweets can become inaccessible, so can't be viewed or deleted by any means. Some cases where we've noticed this are: -

• When you've retweeted a tweet and the original tweet was later deleted.
• When you've retweeted a tweet and the original tweet poster's account has later been deleted, suspended or made private.

In these cases your retweet becomes inaccessible, so it's not possible to delete it, and it remains on the counter forever. For this reason, even if you're deleting everything using an uploaded data file, we often won't be able to reduce your tweet count right down to zero.

The counts that usually appear in the status message for completed tasks are: -

• Checked - the total number of tweets we looked at. If this is lower than expected it's probably because you already deleted your recent tweets (see limitations of TweetEraser).
• Deleted - the number of tweets we successfully deleted. Generally if this is less than 'checked' it's because tweets didn't match the age or keyword you specified.

Some other counts only appear in certain circumstances or if we encounter particular errors: -

• Excluded - We didn't delete a tweet because it was on the list of tweets you've excluded (a premium feature).
• Missing - Twitter's API returned a 404 (Not Found) error when we tried to delete a tweet. The most common cause of this is that you or another application already deleted the tweet before we got to it.
• Unauthorized - Twitter's API returned a 401 (Unauthorized) error when we tried to delete a tweet. This can be caused by revoking TweetEraser's access to your account while a task is in progress.
• Forbidden - Twitter's API returned a 403 (Forbidden) error when we tried to delete a tweet. This is most often caused by inaccessible retweets.
• Errors - Twitter's API returned another kind of error status.

If your task is encountering errors and you don't know why, get in touch and we'll take a look. We may have logged additional information.

Types of error that TweetEraser tasks can return include: -

• Authentication error - this can be caused by revoking TweetEraser's access to your Twitter account, or changing certain account details. It's usually fixed by signing in to our site again, which will update our access keys.
• Rate limit error - your account has made too many requests to Twitter recently. Wait a while and try again. If that doesn't help, disable other apps that may be using your account.
• Account locked error - your account has been locked by Twitter (often due to suspected abuse), so we can't access it. Try to unlock it by signing into Twitter, or contact Twitter support.
• Aborted - TweetEraser encountered an unexpectedly high number of errors while attempting to delete your tweets, so gave up.
• Stuck task detected - in rare circumstances an active task can get stuck in our system. This is usually related to maintenance, for example if a server is rebooted while processing your task. After about 30 minutes our system will detect the problem and set this error status. Your deletion will likely only have been partially processed, so you should run it again.
• Unexpected error (details logged) - some other kind of error occurred that our service doesn't currently know how to deal with. We should have captured some info for debugging purposes, so get in touch if you'd like us to investigate.

Sorry, we can't do that. For privacy reasons, we do not store a record of anything TweetEraser deleted. It's impossible for us to recover any deleted tweets.

We state this clearly on every page where you can start a deletion job, and have designed our site very carefully to help users avoid common pitfalls (e.g. being logged in on the wrong account). Unfortunately there will always be some potential for people to accidentally choose the wrong options.