How to Delete Your Facebook and Twitter History
Staff Writer / 10-02-2020 / News
Although more and more people are realising that it’s better to be cautious about what they post on social media these days, old posts from months or even years ago often come back to haunt them. In some extreme cases, people have lost their jobs and reputations over their old social media posts. Whether it was a joke made in bad taste, a photograph you wouldn’t want your boss to see, or an off-colour remark about a sensitive issue, the fact is that it’s all out there, just waiting to be discovered. The good news is that there are a few simple methods you can use to do a much-needed spring clean on your Facebook and Twitter timelines.
How To Delete Facebook History
It’s a time-consuming chore to manually scroll through your Facebook timeline, deleting one post at a time as you go. Facebook doesn’t currently offer an automated way to do bulk post deletions, but there is a solution if you use Google’s Chrome browser. If you aren’t already using Chrome, download and install the browser and then search for an extension called Social Book Post Manager, which automates the Facebook post deletion process and allows you to delete multiple Facebook posts in just one click.
Once you’ve added the extension to Chrome, log in to your Facebook account, click the arrow in the upper right-hand corner and select Activity Log. Click the Social Book Post Manager extension button in the Chrome browser and, from the list of options, select a specific month and year if you want to get rid of everything from a particular period, or enter a search term if you want to delete only posts that contain a specific keyword or hashtag. Once you’ve decided which posts to get rid of, just hit Delete. Social Book Post Manager will then scroll through your timeline and highlight all posts that match your criteria. You can either confirm and nuke all of the selected posts or tweak the parameters again in case there are a few posts you might want to save. The process can be slow, so it’s a good idea to just select a month at a time and then rinse and repeat to get your timeline squeaky clean.
How To Delete Twitter History
Just like Facebook, Twitter doesn’t offer users an option to delete old posts in bulk, which means you’ll have to scroll through your timeline manually to delete tweets and retweets. One of the best, free third-party services that can automate the process for you is a web app called TweetDelete. To use TweetDelete, head to their home page, sign in with your Twitter account, and authorize the app to access your account.
TweetDelete lets you delete up to 3200 tweets at a time based on the specified age limit, such as tweets older than 6 months or one year. You may have to rerun the app if you have thousands of tweets that you want to purge. Once you’ve activated the app and it completes its initial run, it will then check your account periodically for tweets that are older than the specified age (for example, 6 months) and will automatically delete them. If you just want a once-off clean of old tweets, you can easily disable TweetDelete at any time by revoking its access to your Twitter account in your settings menu.
For both Facebook and Twitter, please ensure you backup anything you want to keep from your timeline before running these services, which delete everything permanently. It’s a good idea to download your Facebook and Twitter archives before doing a clean-up on your accounts.