Account shows no tweets after deleting ~2900 tweets

[jbfriedrich]

All,

I wrote some scripts that use the REST API and allow me to list and delete my tweets. After deleting ~3000 tweets, I expected that after a while (a couple of hours) the next 3000 tweets would be visible in the timeline and that I could then proceed deleting all my old tweets. But it seems it does not work that way, instead no tweets at all are displayed anymore – even though Twitter displays there are still 14.4K tweets.

I would be interested in finding answers to two questions:

• Why is this happening? Is this by design or a bug? How can I retrieve my old tweets via API?
• Is there a way to delete the rest of my tweets from my account? An API that I overlooked?

Thanks,
Jason

[IgorBrigadir]

Getting your own tweets with https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/user_timeline will only return last 3200 tweets - so it seems like deleting tweets won’t get you around this limit. Haven’t tried something like that so can’t speak from experience - but seems to me that this is by design.

I’m not sure about tweet counts not updating after deletions part - maybe updating counts is skipped for efficiency reasons?

If you want a list of all your tweets the only way to do it is using the Archive (“Request your archive” from account settings) - you can then extract all your tweet ids and start deleting them slowly over time (the statuses/destroy endpoint doesn’t have an explicit ratelimit, but it’s safe to assume it’s 15 calls per 15 minutes - you may be able to speed things up if you try https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/statuses/unretweet/%3Aid for RTs assuming that the two endpoints have separate ratelimits)

[jbfriedrich]

Thanks a lot! It seems I could not see the wood for all the trees. I downloaded the twitter archive and used the provided CSV file to create a script that deletes my old tweets. Unfortunately the number that is displayed as “Tweets” on the profile is not going down to zero. It stops at around 450, give or take.

I will now wait a couple of days, request the archive again and see if i then get more or other tweets than i got before. Maybe the tweet archive has a limit somewhere. I will continue to investigate and update this thread if I find something out.

[jbfriedrich]

OK, some follow-up on this matter. I just downloaded my archive again and the archive tells me that my account made 36 tweets. But my account is still showing 463 tweets on the profile page. I am not sure why this irregularity exists, but it seems that this number of total tweets is not updated correctly. Maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s on purpose, I am not sure.

Is there a way to open a case or ask an official Twitter resource why this happens and if it is intentional?