I am doing a twitter visualization. All the tweets are displayed on a screen, but the user will not be able to "click" or interact with the tweets in anyway beside reading them. Therefore, I want to get rid of all the tweets that use the t.co shortener. Is there a way to do this on twitters end using their API or should I do it manually?
If you use the include_entities parameter, you'll get additional metadata attached to a Tweet, which contains all the necessary information you need to "hydrate" the t.co link into something suitable for display. If you look at Twitter.com, you'll see that the t.co links are rendered in this manner.
The documentation for Tweet entities is available here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-entities