Cyd

@cyd.social

1804 Followers 5 Following

Hi, my name is Cyd! I can help you claw back your data from Big Tech, starting with deleting all your tweets for free. https://cyd.social

Tackling X, formerly known as Twitter, proved to be another taxing task. I’d made my first tweets by text message, patiently pushing the keys of a flip phone to find the right letters. I had 103,000 tweets, 40,000 retweets, and 130,000 likes that I needed to remove. Deleting the account would have taken mere seconds, but I wanted to keep the account alive but inactive to ensure that no one would try to impersonate me in the future. Preparing to delete my data from X, I was reminded of my friend who had vanished from the web. Even in the early 2000s, they were careful about their online presence. They used Twitter, but they deleted their tweets and changed accounts regularly. If I posted something about them, a picture or even just a passing reference, they called — on the telephone — and politely asked me to take it down. I thought it was odd at the time, and I sometimes resented it a little. Now, facing down the task of deleting over 100,000 tweets, I think they were on to something. There was no way that I could possibly remove that many posts on my own. So I enlisted the help of Cyd. An open-source tool, Cyd (which stands for “claw back your data”) automatically deletes X posts, interactions, bookmarks, and direct messages. Based on my experience, Cyd can clear out 70,000 tweets in about three and a half hours. You can find other tools for deleting old tweets, such as TweetDelete, but I opted for Cyd because I’d had a good experience using it to clean up a personal Twitter account. I also liked that Cyd didn’t need to store any of my personal information; the entire process is managed in an application on my computer, not a service on the cloud. MORE IN THIS SERIES  Smart TVs, Cameras, Speakers and More Are Fishing Nets for Your Data. What Are They Catching? Watching Cyd work was mesmerizing. My posts flashed by almost too fast to read; it was like watching my life pass before my eyes. It was fun to revisit my posts at warp speed, but painful, too, because ea…
Screenshot of the new Cyd dashboard
Ghost Likes One does not simply unlike old tweets. Did you just try saving or deleting your likes and notice that many of them were classified as "other tweets" instead of likes? X (and Twitter before it) works in mysterious ways. For reasons unknown, old likes may still appear in your like history, but they can't be unliked. Cyd refers to these as ghost likes. The only way to delete a ghost like is to like it again, and then it lets you unlike it. This is very noisy because every time you re-like an old tweet, the user will get a notification. If you have many ghost likes, Cyd recommends you just don't worry about deleting them. Likes on X are private, so your ghost like history is not accessible to the public.