How To Delete All of Your Instagram Direct Messages

One of the most popular Instagram features is the Direct Message (DM) feature. With DMs, users can privately chat one-on-one with their friends or create group chats. While several messaging apps are available, many people use Instagram as their leading instant messaging service.

At the same time, Instagram didn’t get designed to organize a whole chat log of DMs, and it shows in the relative lack of tools for managing your DM inbox. Your inbox can quickly become cluttered between messages from your friends, spam, and sketchy links sent by scammers.

So, Is there a way to delete all of your messages at once and get a fresh start? This article explains a few options to clean up your Instagram DMs.

How to Delete Conversations on Android and iPhone/iOS

To delete a conversation, perform the following steps:

1. Tap the message icon (paper airplane) at the top-right of your home screen.
   
2. Tap the conversation that you want to delete and drag it to the left or long-press it to bring up the message options.
   
3. Select Delete.

Once you complete the steps above, the group messages no longer appear in your inbox. Keep in mind that the other person still has access to them.

If you’re trying to get rid of specific conversations, you can also use the Search function to find those messages rather than scrolling through your entire DM inbox. You can type a person’s name in the search bar at the top of your screen to find and delete your conversation with them.

Delete Individual Messages on Android and iPhone/iOS

Instagram quietly introduced the Unsend feature a few years ago. It allows you to un-send messages that haven’t been read yet.

If you’ve never used Unsend on Instagram before, here’s what you need to do:

1. Open up the DM conversation
2. Tap and Hold the unwanted message
3. Select Unsend Message.
   

The steps above delete the message on both ends, so it’s like you never sent it at all. If you ever send a message that you later regret, you can delete it before the other person sees it. Otherwise, you are out of luck.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to bulk-delete individual messages within Instagram, so you’ll have to repeat the above steps for every message. Of course, you can always try using a third-party auto-clicking app.

Delete All of Your Instagram Direct Messages with AutoClicker on Android/iPhone/iOS

AutoClicker for Android and AutoClicker for iOS are tools that let you automate repeated taps and swipes in any app or screen on your device. Once you play around with it, you will be very excited by the possibilities this powerful free program provides. However, for now, this article focuses on deleting your DMs on Instagram.

1. Launch your Instagram app.
2. Launch the Auto Clicker app.
   
3. In the Multi Targets Mode section, tap Enable. This will allow you to have multiple points of tapping with a delay between taps.
   
4. On Instagram, go to your Direct Messages screen.
5. Tap and hold the green plus symbol to create a swipe point, a circle with the number 1 inside it. Drag the swipe point to the first conversation in your DMs.
   
6. Move the second circle inside the first circle. This process instructs AutoClicker to tap and hold.
7. Tap the circle to bring up the Settings dialog for this swipe. Set the delay to 1000 milliseconds and the swipe time to 1000 milliseconds.
   
8. On Instagram, long-tap on the first conversation to actually move the process along so that you can see where to do the next taps.
9. The context menu appears. Tap on the + icon to add a tap point, and drag the tap point to the line of the context menu reading Delete. This tap point becomes #2 and will have a 2 in the circle.
10. On Instagram, tap the delete line to move the process along again.
11. Tap on the + icon to create tap point 3, and drag the tap point to the appropriate spot.
12. Hit cancel to not delete this conversation at this point.
13. Tap the gear icon and give this tap script (they call it a configuration) a name. Save the script, and now you can run this command repeatedly for hundreds or thousands of iterations, automatically and without any human oversight.
    
14. Hit the blue Run arrow to execute your script.

You can turn off the AutoClicker app interface by disabling it on the AutoClicker app home screen.

AutoClicker is, without a doubt, a powerful tool that you can use in many ways, not just for speeding up your Instagram DM deletion process!

Deleting Instagram Direct Messages FAQs

Does blocking someone on Instagram delete all messages?

No, blocking Instagram users has nothing to do with sent messages. If you choose to block someone on Instagram and go back to their message thread, the “Delete” option will appear. If you choose to remove the messages, they will only get deleted on your end. The other user can still see all of the communications you’ve sent.

The only way to remove messages from someone else’s account is to un-send them, but they must not have read them yet. Open the Instagram DMs, tap on their message thread, and long-press each message you’ve sent, then tap “Unsend Message.” Depending on your level of determination to remove each message you’ve sent to the user, this could take an incredibly long time, but it’s certainly a helpful feature.

Can you delete all Instagram DMs at once?

Unfortunately, Instagram does not support deleting all your messages simultaneously, not even when using third-party DM deleting apps. You have to manually delete each conversation, one by one, unless you use an app such as AutoClicker that sets automatic clicks.

Regardless of setbacks, you can delete entire conversations in one go. This option means you’ll only have to repeat the deletion process once per conversation, not once per message. It’s still a pain, but it’s a lot better than having to do it one message at a time.