Twitter has been an amazing social network, but the recent acquisition by Elon Musk has thrown the platform into chaos. Mass lay-offs, voluntary redundancies and other internal issues spell trouble, with many predicting it could fail in the near future.
If you’re thinking it may be time to pull anchor and set sail for other shores – maybe Mastodon – then you should know that you can take a record of your tweets with you.
We explain how it’s done.
How to download your Twitter data
Tucked away in the account settings on Twitter is a feature that allows you to download an archive of your account that the company states include ‘account information, account history, apps and devices, account activity, interests, and Ads data’. To do so, you’ll need to follow these simple steps.
1.
Log in
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Log into the web version of your Twitter account and click the More option.
2.
Go to Settings
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Select Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Your account.
3.
Download you data.
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In the Your Account section, click on Download an archive of your data
4.
Verify it’s you
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You’ll need to verify your account to continue, so enter the code.
5.
Request archive
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Once you’ve entered your code, click the Request archive button.
You should see a message appear letting you know that Twitter is preparing your download, but this can take up to 24 hours. So, hopefully Twitter is still going by the time the Zip file of your archive appears in your inbox.
When it does turn up, you should find that it includes a couple of folders, named assets and data, plus a HTML file called Your archive.html. If you want to look back through your Twitter history, then open the latter in a browser window and select the Tweets option from the left-hand column. Now you can see all the things you’ve said over the years. Hopefully Twitter doesn’t disappear, but at least if it does you’ll have some record of the time you spent on it and the conversations you had.
If you want to leave no trace behind, then we also advise you delete your Twitter account as well.
