Twitter Favorites are a privacy risk. The thousands of tweets that you favorite says a lot about who you are and that information is visible publicly for everyone to see. It’s similar to the profile that Cambridge Analytica built up with Facebook profile data.
Searching for a solution, I found a JavaScript gist that worked, so I customized it. Log into Twitter on the web, open your Developer Console e.g. Developer -> Developer Tools -> Console and paste in this code:
var cnt=1;
var interval = setInterval(clearFavs, 1500);
function clearFavs() {
cnt+=1;
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
if (cnt>5) {
clearInterval(interval);
$('.ProfileTweet-actionButtonUndo.ProfileTweet-action--unfavorite').click();
}
}
It repeatedly scrolls the page and clicks the unfavorite button. On my older Twitter account, I’ve found that deleting tweets and favorites either does not delete the entire history or it does not reset Twitter’s counters. But, it does delete all of the available, visible tweets and favorites. For example, after deleting my favorites with this script, Twitter reported that I have several thousand favorites … they’re just nowhere to be found.
If you’re interested in deleting your tweets, Tweet Delete seems to work well. It’s free and respects your privacy, at least it says so. I’ve found TweetDeleter to work well but they are no longer free for necessary use cases.
Pressure Twitter to reduce advertising, check out this AmericaPossible’s BlockTogether list of 5,300 Twitter advertisers.
Here are two other Twitter resources:
- Block Together List for Major Twitter Advertisers
- Block Together List for Fox News, Fox Affiliates and Sinclair Stations
Also, keep in mind Trump’s Republican congress passed a law to allow your Internet Service Provider e.g. Comcast and Xfinity, Century Link to use and sell your browsing history. This is likely worse than any of the above. Use a VPN. Push for an Internet Bill of Rights with privacy protections.
Hi Jeff. Very handy advice but I seem to have hit a snag. I’m using FF 60.0.1 and have a numer of ‘security & privacy’ extensions which I have deactivated, and whilst the script works, it does maybe 50 un-likes then stops (painful as I have 8000 likes I’m attempting to remove + using tweetdelete website to continuously remove tweets older than a month) – looking at the message in the console, it says this in most instances:
Content Security Policy: Ignoring ‘x-frame-options’ because of ‘frame-ancestors’ directive.
and this sometimes:
This site appears to use a scroll-linked positioning effect. This may not work well with asynchronous panning; see https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Performance/ScrollLinkedEffects for further details and to join the discussion on related tools and features!
When I go to that Mozilla url, it’s way above my noob head.
Does your srcipt relate to an older FF and needs a slight revamp for asynchronous – could you update it for us if that is the case?
Thanks heaps in advance
This works!!! Thank you this solves a big problem with the amount of likes I would have to go through. It would of been impossible without your scrypt. I got to the console by my likes twitter page: Then right clicking the mouse and selecting Inspect ]—-> Console and pasting your scrypt into the box.
Hi ! Thanks for your script ! I wonder if there’s a way to choose older favorites’ tweets rather than newer ?
Thx
Due to the scrolling required to reach older tweets, you’d still need to do the scrolling … and you’d have to write code to customize the script to look for date information. Not sure it’s possible.