Security Journalist Tries to Scrub 356 Accounts, but 103,000 X Posts and Facebook Settings Slow Him
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 7
Security Journalist Tries to Scrub 356 Accounts, but 103,000 X Posts and Facebook Settings Slow Him
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 7
Summary
356 accounts surfaced in the journalist’s password manager, and he prioritized roughly two dozen exposed in breaches plus about 30 more holding sensitive details for cleanup.
Instead of deleting everything, he often kept accounts alive but stripped them down—swapping in synthetic names, random images and unique masked email addresses to make impersonation and cross-site tracking harder.
103,000 tweets, 40,000 retweets and 130,000 likes on X were too much to remove manually, so he used the open-source tool Cyd, which he said can erase 70,000 tweets in about 3.5 hours.
Facebook proved the hardest target: recovery and export tools were clumsy across older services, Instagram required click automation, and Meta’s settings left him spending days deleting data with only tagged photos still remaining.
25 years of posts, photos and forgotten profiles turned the project into a case study in how difficult it is to truly disappear online even for a security-focused user.