I first joined Twitter in 2009 because I heard someone reference it and was curious what it was. I didn't use it much then, but I do now to get news and updates on things I'm interested in. I was working with python at the time, and wanted to create a bot using Twitter's API. I've seen plenty of stories on social media about athletes and celebrities having old, inappropriate tweets dug up from their past, so I thought why not make a bot that people can use to clear their Twitter history? It's painstakingly slow to manually delete tweets, especially if you've tweeted a lot over multiple years. So with my plan in mind, I started writing some code to make it happen.
2020
Python, API, Heroku, Twitter
This is a super simple python bot that runs on Heroku. The logic is just retrieving a Twitter profile's tweet history, checking the creation date to see if it's existed for more than a year, make sure it's not a retweet, and then delete! I also added a check for if it's been liked by the profile, so if I want to save a tweet of mine for more than a year, I can just like my own tweet as a "don't delete this" flag that my bot will see.
The hardest part of this project was getting Twitter to approve my developer application. After I was approved, I just had to throw in the authorization tokens and I could grab all the Tweets I wanted. I have worked with Python and Twitter before for a school project where we scrapped tweets for keywords, so this wasn't too challenging for me. The scheduling is ran using a Heroku worker process that starts at 4am each day.
I don't have many tweets to delete these days, as I mostly read other users tweets and might retweet something occasionally. But this project was great practice for me and I was glad I learned how to use Twitter's API. You'll see in a more recent project I was able to use it again for another bot!