How to delete entire twitter conversations (direct messages)?

I recently wanted to delete a massive twitter conversation with thousands of messages. To my surprise, there’s no way to delete a whole conversation with a single click in the Twitter.com Web GUI. The Twitter MacOS App has a “Delete Conversation” entry in a conversation’s context menu, but that just removes it from the Gui. Restarting the app shows that it is, in fact, still present.

My guess is that their Message storage doesn’t allow efficient deletion of conversations. But what if I _really_ want to get rid of them?

An option is to search for these services… you know… those shady ones that claim they can do the job for you, want access to your twitter account and, after you have granted them full access, ask you to take out your wallet and pay if you _really_ want them to help you. Well, F such a business model. Seriously.

There’s an easier, much safer way to delete entire conversations and guess what: I’ll tell it to you for free!

Okay, here’s what you do:

1. Open Chrome (we’ll need the developer console. Other browsers might work, too, but I use Chrome, so I’m gonna stick with it here)
2. Log in to twitter and go to your “Me” page

   https://twitter.com/<yournick>

3. Open your messages (the button with the envelope) and select the conversation you want to delete. You now have the conversation-to-be-deleted in front of you.
4. Open the JavaScript Developer console (Command+Alt+J on Chrome / MacOS)
5. Paste the following JavaScript into the console and press enter:

   $('#global-actions').append($('<li id="del-script">').append($('<a class="js-nav">"').text('...')));
   window.delscrpt = setInterval(function() {
     $('.js-dm-error:visible').each(function() { $('a.js-dismiss', this).click(); });
     var count = $('.js-dm-delete').length;
     if (count < 3) {
       $('#del-script a').text('Del Done.');
       clearInterval(window.delscrpt);
       return;
     }
     var randIdx = Math.floor((Math.random()*count)+1);
     $('#del-script a').text('Del ' + randIdx + '/' + count);
     $('.js-dm-delete').eq(randIdx).click();
     $('.dm-delete-confirm .js-prompt-ok').each(function() { $(this).click(); });
   }, 2000);

6. Sit back, relax and watch your conversation disappear one message at a time.

DISCLAIMER:

• Don’t expect any support. Use at your own risk. I think this should be pretty obvious 😉
• This method works by directly manipulating the HTML DOM of the twitter page (remote controlling the GUI if you will). It works for now (mid-September 2013), but if twitter changes their homepage, this method will die. Keep that in mind.
• The deletion might take some time. We don’t want to hammer the twitter servers and get our account blocked after all 😉
• Twitter has some major issues with message deletion (internal server error’s and stuff). That’s why we can’t delete messages in order and have to delete them randomly until the conversation is empty. You can’t just delete parts of a conversation. You’ve been warned.
• The script will stop when less than 3 messages are left in the conversation, in order not to bug out. You’ll have to spend the 10 seconds and delete these last messages manually.
• The script displays some numbers in the twitter navigation bar (in the background). The first number is the index of the randomly selected message that’s being deleted from within the returned message list. The second is the total number of messages currently returned by the twitter servers. This total number doesn’t represent the “real” number of left-over messages all the time. That’s just because of the way twitter works and spits out your messages… Non-deterministic NoSQL and stuff…

Hope it’s useful to anyone 🙂