I have been running a bunch of cleanup scripts to prune my twitter account, in the spirit of GDPR, and letting others to likewise without having to give away their creds or money to the various websites that offer this. https://gist.github.com/fommil/61345d594d89a4725a43fab625f2bde0
However, I’ve discovered two Twitter bugs
- you can’t delete retweets authored by people who’ve since blocked you (or if they’ve gone private). This can’t be done manually either because it is not possible to browse to the tweet.
- you can’t unlike things more than a year old (in fact these still appear on your “Likes” timeline without a heart and cannot be deleted permanently, even by manually clicking on the hearts… they always come back)
I tried reporting these bugs via the help bot, but it has gone into a black hole.
In the light of GDPR, I think it would be good to allow users more control over their data and being able to clear tweets and likes is a part of the right to be forgotten. I’d rather not have to delete my twitter account in order to make that a reality, as there are some tweets I wish to keep.
The retweet bug is particularly frustrating, as it means that after a clear out you are left with only retweets of people you (probably) don’t get along with! These are visible in the public version of your profile.
