How to delete tweets older than 3,200

Scroll down your profile on X for long enough and it stops, even though you know there are older tweets. That's not a bug. X only serves your most recent 3,200 posts, and it limits your likes the same way. Anything older is still public to anyone with the link, but you can't reach it by scrolling, and neither can any tool that works by scrolling.

The way in is your X archive. It lists every post you have ever made, with a link to each one, so you can open an old post directly and delete it.

Step 1: request your archive

1. On x.com, open Settings and privacy, then Your account, then Download an archive of your data. This link goes straight there.
2. Confirm your password and the verification code X sends you, then press Request archive.
3. Wait. X prepares the archive in the background and tells you when it is ready. For a large account this can take a day or more.
4. Download the ZIP file. Keep it somewhere private, because it contains your whole account history.

Step 2, by hand

Unzip the archive and open Your archive.html in your browser. It lets you browse every tweet you have posted, including the ones your profile no longer shows. Each tweet has a long number as its ID, and x.com/i/web/status/ followed by that number opens it on X. Delete it there and move to the next.

This costs nothing and needs no software. It is also one tweet at a time, so it only makes sense if you have a few dozen old tweets to remove rather than a few thousand.

Step 2, in bulk with Xpurge

Xpurge reads the archive and works through every old post for you. The archive is read in your browser and is never uploaded anywhere. Archive import is part of Xpurge Pro.

1. Add Xpurge to Chrome, open x.com and sign in as usual.
2. Open the Xpurge dashboard, press Import X archive and choose the ZIP file you downloaded.
3. Turn on Check imported posts after the timeline.
4. Under Choose what to remove, pick the content types and set any filters, such as everything before 2020 or anything mentioning a word. Add protections for anything you want to keep.
5. Read the sentence Xpurge writes describing the run, then press Try a test run. It lists every match and deletes nothing.
6. When the list looks right, press Start and leave the x.com tab visible while it works.

Xpurge clears what it can reach on your timeline first, then opens each older post from the archive directly and removes it. It saves a copy of each post's text on your computer before removing it, if you leave backups on.

Things worth knowing

• Deleting on X is permanent. The copy Xpurge keeps is a text record for you, and it cannot put a post back.
• Likes in the archive carry no date. If you set a date filter, Xpurge keeps undated likes rather than guessing.
• X throttles accounts that delete quickly. Xpurge paces itself and backs off when X pushes back, so a big archive takes a few sittings.
• If you liked one of your own tweets, deleting the tweet removes the like with it.