Archiving, erasing and parking old tweets
Many reporters have chosen to leave their Twitter account behind
Welcome to a new year, reporters! I used to think it was ethically sketchy to delete old social posts. Until an editor pointed out that, realistically, only someone with negative intentions would be digging up years-old tweets.
That’s a really good point, so I decided to archive and clear out my own Twitter. TweetDelete seems to the most popular option for this, but I chose it because it lets you heavily customize. For example, I saved exactly one two-year-old tweet from destruction; the other 17 years went down the drain.
You may be thinking, but what about my 17 years of tweets?? Luckily, Twitter has an easy to use (and still functional) export tool. TweetDelete adds on to it by turning the export (which is JSON) into a CSV (which may be easier to look at). So of course, I heavily recommend archiving this file before all your posts go bye bye.
I’m excited to announce the launch of the official Tools for Reporters Database - my #1 recommendations for all reporting tasks from audio production to web scraping.
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To delete your whole opus, you do need to sign up for TweetDelete Premium (I paid the $7 fee and then canceled). But if you’re going to keep using Twitter, you may want to take advantage of their service to autodelete regularly.
Many folks are leaving these days, and “parking” their account - something I would also recommend. So: archive, scrub, then park. Good luck!
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