Delete your tweets without authorising an app

X has no button for deleting your history in bulk, so most people end up at a web service that offers to do it. The first step is nearly always Sign in with X. That button doesn't share your password, but it does give the service a token that lets it act on your account through X's API, and it keeps working until you revoke it. For posts older than the most recent 3,200, many services also ask you to upload your X archive, which holds your entire history.

Plenty of people are fine with that. If you are not, you can do the same job without giving anything to anyone.

Check what you have already authorised

On x.com, open Settings and privacy, then Security and account access, then Apps and sessions, then Connected apps. Everything listed there can still use your account in whatever way you allowed when you connected it. Revoke anything you no longer use, including tweet deleters you tried once.

How Xpurge does it instead

Xpurge is a browser extension. It works inside the x.com tab you are already signed in to and presses the same delete, undo repost and unlike buttons you would press yourself, at a pace close to a person's.

• There is nothing to authorise. Xpurge never sees your password and never holds a token for your account.
• Your posts, filters and records stay in your browser's own storage.
• Your X archive, if you import one, is read in the browser and never uploaded.
• The free version sends no requests anywhere except x.com. Pro makes one licence check, carrying the licence key and a random installation number. It never includes your X handle, your email address or any post.

The privacy policy lists everything Xpurge reads and stores.

What you are trusting instead

Any extension that can delete posts for you needs permission to read and change pages on x.com, and Xpurge asks for exactly that. So the trust doesn't disappear. It moves to code running on your own machine, where you can see what it does, and you can remove it at any moment from your browser's extensions page. For some people that is a better deal than a token held on someone else's server. For others it makes no difference, and that is a reasonable view too.

The costs of doing it this way

A service can delete while your computer is off. Xpurge can't. It works only while the x.com tab is open and visible, because browsers stop loading pages in background tabs, and it pauses when you switch away. It is also deliberately slow, since X restricts accounts that delete faster than a person could. A large clean-up takes a few sittings rather than a few minutes.