If you want to delete a retweet from a private account, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your account and click on the three lines in the top left corner of the screen.
  2. On the left hand side, you will see a list of your tweets.
  3. Click on the one that you want to delete.
  4. In the next window, you will be asked to confirm your deletion request. If you don’t agree to deletion, click on Cancel and continue with step 5 below.
  5. Click on Delete and confirm your deletion request in the next window again.

Simply click on the “Missing Tweet” link at the bottom of the screen. Then select “Link is broken.” This will return this information back into Twitter’s ecosystem, where new tweets and retweets won’t show up in your list of activity. The URL for that tweet will continue to exist and remain in a searchable index hosted by Bing/Yahoo. (note: It may take a few minutes for that particular retweet to stop showing up in your friends’ timelines.)

If there are any tweet IDs in this list that contain RT or MT, those were retweets or a quote from another user. Retweets will NOT show up in an API response unless the original tweet (or user) has their privacy set to “Everyone,” so these “missing” tweets would not have shown up if you requested them directly through Twitter’s API.

Please note: This may be related to an issue with home timelines for certain users who only follow one account. They are seeing this message because they receive all the retweets from that account, even if the original tweet was posted to a protected timeline (in which case it could be deleted).

Best practice is to filter those tweets out of your main timeline by setting up a new user account and following only your personal account on that new account. Then set your home timeline view to follow just that second user account – otherwise you’ll see all my retweets in yours!

If anyone comes across other tips or tricks for removing RTs from their home timelines with multiple accounts, please share them here! I didn’t want to create yet another private group on google plus when there’s lots of discussion going on already (and Google Plus is not accessible through work web browsers).