How to Delete Tweets Before Giving an Account to Someone Else
Adding on, you need to look to see rate limits during the transfer period and what is irreversible.
CI Changes When You Hand over the Keys
Offering someone else access to your X account does not just mean letting them post. You are compounds to give them all your posts ever. The replies you forgot about, the retweets with links to things you no longer agree with, conversations that were private when they happened but are still sitting there in your time line. The successor sees the complete history as you do when scrolling down your own profile. No reset button that erases the past whilst allowing for the handle to keep living.
Professionally, the most common reason that people give over an account. A brand account is taken over by a social media manager; or a founder passes the company feed to a marketing team. However, people also hand accounts over to friends, sell them or even pass one on after a relationship split when one partner has been the driving force behind the shared involvement. In each instance, the new person inherits each updated post. The new owner may find something you would prefer not to because you have been posting as an individual under a handle that turned into a business or the account contains personal opinions from years ago.
What to Verify Before You Start Deleting
First you must look for the whole picture before making a choice of what to keep and what not; About 3,200 posts load on like X's own timeline. That amounts to the past three to five years for an active account—but it is not your full history. To view all of this, obtain your X archive from account settings. It takes approximately 24 hours to generate, and has all posts ever made — including deleted ones from your own download history. Until you have that file, do not start deleting, because once a post is gone there is only the archive where you will see it again.
At the same time, perform a advanced search for your own handle using from: as the first step in generating your archive. Sort by year and see if anything pops: gripes about past employers; political stances that might look a little different on their current date; outdated contact information, or dumb in-jokes out of context. This does not say posts — post categories, rather Classifying first helps you avoid the entire work of scanning each post individually. Create a to-go list: Dating posts; complaints about old work-place; anything with phone numbers or addresses, inside jokes that the new custodian has no context for.
What to Archive for Yourself
Decide what you need to keep for your own records before deleting a single post. The X archive will give you a complete copy of everything you ever posted, but it is just a raw data dump. That means the actual text of each post, when it was posted, and how many people responded to it, but not images or video in the same format. Take screenshots or download the image before you delete If there are posts with particular media components you want to retain. Save things like personal milestones, conversations with people you no longer talk to or posts that note something important to you outside of X.
You not have to keep all things For most people, once you want to pass on your account they realize roughly 90% of their timeline is disposable. It is the ten percent worth salvaging from your life — family photos, big announcements, or creative work you are proud of — the threads that spurred social connection. Which of those will still be there after the account changes hands? Be honest. A birthday post from five years ago may not mean anything to the new owner, or everything to you — so take it offline before clearing the account.
Bulk Deletion Operation Inside The Limits Of X
For using X, 50 API requests every 15 minutes are allowed per user. It requires one request to get one, and same goes with deleting a post. This means if you have a running deletion tool you'd get rid of roughly 200 posts per hour. Cleaning up a typical account with a couple thousand posts takes from several hours to one full day maximum if we are going pretty far back. Something you cannot expedite on account of having multiple accounts to create or automated browser scripts that click faster than the API permits. X impose a rate limit in server side and it is not per tool but per user.
TweetSweep adheres to this limit by queuing deletion requests and sending them at the permitted pace. You choose a date range, you select a keyword filter or an engagement threshold and the tool goes over posts behind the curtains. You do not have to be seated at the computer. The cleanup works as long as there are posts for the tool to delete, ending once it reaches your timeline's end or X's enforced 3,200-post ceiling in third-party apps. If an account has more than 3,200 viewable posts it will be necessary to run the tool in multiple sessions because once you delete newer posts the older posts are rotated into your visible window.
What Cannot Be Accessed After Deletion
When you delete a post in the API or the X interface, it is deleted from the servers at X. Not showing in your timeline, not showing in search and not showing in their feed. X will not recover removed posts. If worse come to worst and you change your mind, the only way to retrieve it is if its saved in your archive or somewhere else. That will cause the post to disappear from all of your likes, your retweets and inside other people's threads where you've enjoyed this content. Those who bookmarked the post will see a message stating that it is unavailable after the takedown.
However, the deletion cannot undo external copies. Other peoples' screenshots, quote tweets with your words in them, archives on sites like the Wayback Machine and Google's cached search results can stick around forever. No deletion tool can delete those, and neither can X. A post that has already been widely shared may attract more attention from deleting it than leaving it. In those situations, you can opt to leave the post and fork out a pin clarification instead. If it really is a true account transfer and you want to give the new person a fresh start, you're almost always better off risking a copy rather than letting the new owner have free range on someone else's life via their complete timeline.
Final Hours of Transfersfor transfers
Once your bulk deletion completes, wait for at least 24 hours before transferring over the login credentials. Because of that time window, visit your profile while logged out, or from a browser you are not signed into. This literally shows you what another owner, or an outsider sees. Search for content that you can (1) use to find posts that remain after the delete—due to an out-of-date date window or passing by search terms. You go through manually and delete anything that got through the cracks. Also checkout your likes tab, your pinned post and your profile biio. Most bulk deletion tools do not cover these and need to be manually cleared.
When the handover occurs, use the credentials of the new owner changing the email address & phone number linked to to account. Do this while you can, because once the password for your email address has changed, verification of any account changes will be sent to your previous email. After cleanup, remove any linked apps such as TweetSweep If you previously purchased X Premium with your own payment method, cancel that subscription prior to transferring or switch the billing responsibility to the new owner. Lastly, record what you archived and where exactly you made those saves, then log off. From that point on, it is someone elses account and your history there is over.