Ever since Twitter was born in 2006, countless messages have been shared around the world on the microblogging social network par excellence. If you are an active user of the service, you’ve probably also posted thousands of tweets on your profile; and a particular feature of this platform is that, with an average of 500 million tweets daily, the lifespan of each message is very short. The same is true of your accounts: it didn’t really matter if there was compromising information in your early tweets because it was quite difficult to find those messages. Now, though, Twitter lets you filter search results by date.
With the new advanced search feature you can search any user’s messages that contain certain keywords or hashtags. This might seem insignificant, but it’s a technique that many companies are now using when they hire new employees to see if they suit the company’s profile.
Some people are not careful about the way they use social networks and reveal too much publicly as if there were no such thing as privacy. Thus, if you’re one of those who posted complaints about your old boss or logged on to Twitter after having had one too many, we explain below how to find and delete those tweets.
Search for compromising messages
When you go to advanced search, you’ll see two sections: one to add keywords and another to specify which account it has been sent from. Twitter makes this process very simple, you just have to type in a particular set of search terms (such as boss, work, party, or drunk), the hashtags, or the exact phrase (if you remember it), and specify the handle of the user in questions, whether it be your own or another person’s.
Once you’ve done the search, Twitter displays by default the highlighted messages, meaning you’ll have to switch to the “All” tab and delete the offending tweets as necessary.
In addition to the search terms and username, this filter also allows you to specify the places the tweets have been sent from, ones that include happy or sad faces or question marks, or your retweets.
Delete your first tweets
If now you are a responsible account user but weren’t much of one in the past, you can use the latest feature added by Twitter and search your first messages by date range. You just have to type your handle and set the range you want to view in “Dates”. Don’t forget to tick the “All” tab.
Also if you don’t remember when you started tweeting, you can check the date on First Tweet, a web that will show your very first tweet if you type your username.
