Script to remove old tweets

People who are active in social networks, sooner or later begin to think about the side effects of their actions. Over the years, more and more information has been accumulated in the public domain that someone can use against them. Frivolous tweets from the past can cause damage when a person grows to a serious position and attracts the attention of the public. Ask about the technical director of the Governor of Florida, who was forced to quit when the press dug out his tweets six years ago . Or the technical director of Business Insider, who was expelled from work for the same reason . Or three Canadian firefighters who were fired for reposting a twitter of sexist quotes from the South Park cartoon and the Office series.

At risk - the most sociable people who have "nothing to hide" and who publish everything that comes to mind.

In general, publications in social networks should be treated with caution. Especially to Twitter posts that are open to the whole world and, accordingly, are considered publicly available information. The press is free to quote them without the permission of the author.
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It is not surprising that some users think about deleting the archive of old tweets just in case . To facilitate the task, special tools are created that automate the process. For example, on Github, you can find a script in Ruby langoliers.rb to automatically destroy old messages.

The author of the “langoliers” is a former employee of Twitter, who more than anyone else understands the danger of excessive social exposure.

In the settings of the script, the lifetime of the tweet (the default is 10 days), the interval between deletions, tweet numbers that cannot be deleted, and other parameters are set.

There are other services to automatically clean your twitter account: TweetDelete , Tweet Deleter , TwitWipe . For example, over 1.3 million people have signed up for TweetDelete services.

Deleting old tweets is not only protection from future revelations. It can be considered as a hygienic procedure that brings your social profile in line with reality, that is, with the current state of the individual. It’s like brushing your teeth or taking a shower — an indispensable need to get rid of the dust left over from past days.

However, removing tweets is not a panacea. They are stored in the search engine caches and in special twitter archives created specifically for archiving remote tweets: for example, Politwoops , Topsy and Undetweetable (although the latter has recently been closed at the request of the Twitter administration).

So sometimes it is better to remain silent than trying to shove the paste back into the tube.