Dodging

I somehow managed to avoid getting listed on K*y*iki (a site that collects data about FB users who are also active in the Left). This is a rough guess about how I did it.

What is K**w**I? https://jacobin.com/2018/06/keywiki-trevor-loudon-anticommunism-red-baiting

facebook

1. Before FB, in the late 1990s and early 2000s I didn’t use my name. In the early 1990s, I did, but never showed affiliation with groups.
2. With FB, I showed my real name… but maybe around 2015, I decided to start archiving and deleting my FB activity. I used a browser extension to automatically delete posts. They change all the time, but somebody out there makes one that works.
3. I’ve avoided taking pictures and having my name on pictures. I will start removing my photo tags, though I did some of that as well.

The Facebook deletion plugins use the Activity Log to find all your posts and comments and likes, and allows you to delete each one.

You pick a year, and what to delete, and it’ll go through, one by one, and delete posts. Then you do comments, likes, follows, etc. It takes hours to clean out your activity. Mine took weeks to delete, and I had to keep a notepad to track what years I’d deleted.

Additionally, the plugin might fail to catch all the posts, so you need to re-run a year, just to make sure it’s cleaned out. This is also why you need to break up your work into these year-sized chunks, to check the work.

I kept a year of old content, just because.

You can download all your data from Facebook, and I’ve done some of that, but generally, I don’t care. What I do to archive is dig through old posts, and pick out some to preserve (on here).

twitter

Similar plugins exist for Twitter. I don’t think K**w**i is datamining Twitter so often, but I wasn’t using it that often, either. I deleted my Twitter content, follows, and likes, because I wanted to start clean.