--
title: "A Tweet Cleanup Plan You Will Actually Keep"
description: "One deep clean does not solve a long-term problem. A four-cycle tweet cleaning plan with only one mandatory action."
tags: ["privacy", "productivity", "twitter", "habits"]
canonical_url: https://digital-footprint-health.shop/blog/10-year-cleanup-plan
You spend a weekend clearing ten years of tweets and your score jumps from 40 to 90. What about three years from now? Without a tweet cleaning plan you accumulate a fresh pile and repeat the weekend. Maintenance costs less than remediation, which is the whole argument here.
My own rhythm is light: twenty minutes every six months.
What a deep clean cannot fix
A deep clean handles your stock, not your flow. As long as you keep posting, you keep producing footprint: a new employer name, a new neighborhood after moving, travel check-ins, late-night venting. Harmless today, and in five years they are simply the next batch of old tweets.
There is also memory decay. The hard part of cleanup is not deleting, it is judging whether a post should go, and that judgment degrades fast. You remember the context behind something from six months ago. From eight years ago you are guessing.
Four cycles
- As you post: two quick checks, seconds each, highest value per minute
- Every six months: request an archive, run the check, clear red flags, about 20 minutes
- Yearly: review score movement and page through the year's images, about an hour
- Before a job or city change: a targeted cleanup by risk
Only the second line genuinely needs to survive. The rest is bonus. Design a plan too full and it dies in month one.
Two checks while posting
First, does this contain anything that locates me? A phone number, a street address, an employer, a recognizable background, even the convenience store below my place attached to a photo. Second, if someone screenshotted this next to my name ten years from now, would it sting? If both answers come back cleanly, post it. If either hesitates, rewrite or skip.
Making the reminder fire
I tried three approaches and one survived. Repeating calendar events get dismissed reflexively, and annual todo items get postponed forever. What works is attaching the task to something that already happens. Mine hangs on tax filing and my midyear checkup, since I am already doing annual admin those days and twenty more minutes does not hurt.
Score movement carries more information than the absolute number. A drop means you posted new risky content in those six months. A flat score means you do nothing.
Full plan with the cycle table: https://digital-footprint-health.shop/blog/10-year-cleanup-plan
