Delete (very) old tweets obtained from a twitter archive

deloldtweets.py

#!/bin/python3
# Largely copied from http://www.mathewinkson.com/2015/03/delete-old-tweets-selectively-using-python-and-tweepy
# However, Mathew's script cannot delete tweets older than something like a year (these tweets are not available from the twitter API)
# This script is a complement on first use, to delete old tweets. It uses your twitter archive to find tweets' ids to delete
# How to use it :
#     - download and extract your twitter archive (tweet.js will contain all your tweets with dates and ids)
#     - put this script in the extracted directory
#     - complete the secrets to access twitter's API on your behalf and, possibly, modify days_to_keep
#     - delete the few junk characters at the beginning of tweet.js, until the first '['   (it crashed my json parser)
#     - review the script !!!! It has not been thoroughly tested, it may have some unexpected behaviors...
#     - run this script
#     - forget this script, you can now use Mathew's script for your future deletions
#
#  License : Unlicense http://unlicense.org/

import tweepy

import json
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone

consumer_key = ''
consumer_secret = ''
access_token = ''
access_token_secret = ''
days_to_keep = 365

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)



cutoff_date = datetime.now(timezone.utc) - timedelta(days=days_to_keep)

print(cutoff_date)

fp = open("tweet.js","r")
myjson = json.load(fp)

for tweet in myjson:
    d = datetime.strptime(tweet['created_at'], "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y")
    if d < cutoff_date:
        print(tweet['created_at'] + " " + tweet['id_str'])
        try:
            api.destroy_status(tweet['id_str'])
        except:
            pass

I had the same problem,
Try change line 41 to:

d = datetime.strptime(tweet['created_at'], "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")

Worked for me!

I downloaded my twitter archive to try this out. After unarchiving I could not find a "tweet.js" file but under data/js I do see a tweet_index.js file which is a mapping of data/js/tweets which has many files in year_month.js format.
\I tried dumping the contents of each file other than that in the top line until [ just like oringial instructions but its just throwing errors.
myjson = json.load(fp) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/__init__.py", line 299, in load parse_constant=parse_constant, object_pairs_hook=object_pairs_hook, **kw) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/__init__.py", line 354, in loads return _default_decoder.decode(s) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 342, in decode raise JSONDecodeError("Extra data", s, end) json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Extra data: line 23 column 2 (char 642)

Anyone else ran into this?

I've got the same problem... I don't know how to fix this.

Ok, I removed this part of the tweet.js file: "window.YTD.tweet.part0 =" and it worked.

I had into the following error on first run:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 53148: character maps to undefined

Solved it by modifying line 37 to include encoding
fp = open("tweet.js","r", encoding='UTF-8')

Thanks for the script. Very useful!

@prasket, if it's helpful to you I updated my fork to account for the new js format: https://gist.github.com/AnilRedshift/536d32b9388675d7c98b019d524983a5