For anyone who is sick of either whatever the latest “rich person ruins social network” drama is or the thought of what their own younger self thought was just fine to post to the entire world, the software “Redact” looks like a free and versatile way to remove your posts from a huge variety of services.
It contains filters to allow you to selectively delete things. For example, perhaps you want to delete only Reddit posts you made last year that included the phrase “I love Reddit”, or only the last 7 days of your Twitter DMs. You can also set up a schedule if you want to repeat the delete every so often.
Looking at some of the commentary around the tool it seems like it occasionally stops working for some services. Presumably this is due to changes the social network companies make, including those targeted at stopping tools like this. I suppose you might be infringing certain terms of services if you mass-delete like this in many cases. But whilst the networks don’t spend much effort building their own tools to make it easy to manage and delete your past submissions to their services for obvious reasons this certainly doesn’t feel like a moral crime.
In order to delete things you are going to have to log into your account of the respective services through this software, so you will have to feel OK about trusting that the software isn’t doing bad things. They claim that Redact doesn’t store your info or transmit it anywhere, that their staff have no way of seeing your username of password. But it is closed-source so you can’t check the code directly, so caveat emptor I suppose. I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that anything malicious is going on.
The full list of services it can remove stuff from is long:
- Discord
- Twitch
- YouTube
- Imgur
- Deviantart
- Tumblr
- Microsoft Teams
- Skype
- Slack
- Telegram
- Tinder
- Stack Exchange
- TikTok
- Steam
- Blogger
- Wordpress
- MyAnimeList
- Letterboxd
- Disqus
- Quora
- Github
- Spotify
- IMD
- Gyazo
- Vimeo
- Bumble
- Flickr
- Medium
- Yelp
- Pixiv
- RustleLogs
It’s currently available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Support and other discussions about it mainly seem to happen on their Discord. They also tweet.