Delete all your tweets for free with Cyd

From 2019 to 2023, Semiphemeral was a simple app that helped tens of thousands of people delete tens of millions of tweets, likes, and private direct messages from Twitter (except for the tweets they wanted to keep). After Elon Musk killed the Twitter API, I was forced to shut Semiphemeral down.

I'm excited to announce that Cyd (which is what Semiphemeral goes by these days) is back, and is more ambitious than ever! Cyd makes it easy for you to backup your data and then delete what you want of it from tech platforms like X. Even when they enshittify their services, like by charging exorbitant fees for API access, Cyd can still give you control of your data.

I spent a decade working in journalism security for The Intercept, most recently as the Director of Information Security. I wrote a book teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze hacked and leaked data, including old social media posts. I created open source privacy and security tools like OnionShare and Dangerzone. I hope my newest project, Cyd, will make a similarly significant impact in the world.

Why delete your data from tech platforms?

The tech platforms that we all rely on are controlled by a tiny group of powerful billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. It's increasingly clear that they're not working in the interest of their users. You don't need to give them permanent access to your data. Especially not now, while they're cashing in on the AI boom by selling your data to AI companies to train their models, all without compensating you.

The content that you've been posting to social media for years isn't just enriching billionaires, it's also a privacy nightmare. Most people have an endless trail of OSINT crumbs about them across the internet, waiting to be exploited.

Many of us go out of our way to protect our privacy. We install ad blockers to prevent surveillance capitalists from tracking our every move online. We use encrypted messaging apps like Signal and enable disappearing messages so that we don't have permanent histories of all of our conversations on our phones.

Why should our social media posts, or for that matter our product reviews, ratings, comments, and upvotes, remain on the internet forever?

If you've had an online presence for a long time, it might be a good idea to see what you've posted in the past and delete everything that you don't want out there. This is especially true if you're an activist, a journalist, a parent, or work for a company or non-profit that some people don't like. If you run a business, you might consider providing this service to your employees as a benefit.

Finally, if you're one of the millions of people fleeing the X platform, it's better to delete all of your tweets (and unfollow everyone) but keep your account activated than to delete your account. This way, other people can't take over your username and impersonate you, and you can leave your account with a message telling your followers where to find you.

How Cyd works

Cyd is a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Right now it lets you control your data on X, but more platforms are coming in the future, including Bluesky, Mastodon, and Facebook. Eventually it will expand beyond social media. It works like this:

• Install Cyd and open it on your computer.
• Login to your X account.
• Tell Cyd exactly what you want to delete from that account.
• Sit back and watch as Cyd scrolls around X's website and clicks things in your account for you, doing exactly what you ask of it. Cyd can delete your tweets, likes, and direct messages, and unfollow everyone.

We can't access your accounts or your data

Cyd runs directly on your computer and not on our servers. Cyd is designed so that we don't have access to your accounts, or to any of your data in those accounts.

Backup your data first

Before you delete your data, you can save a backup of it locally on your computer. For example, before deleting your direct messages, you can have Cyd load each of your conversations and save a history of everything that was said. After you delete all of this data from X, you'll be able to load your backup and search through your old messages. (For the nerds, Cyd also creates a SQLite database of all of your data for each account.)

Since Cyd is basically a specialized web browser that's logged into your account, it can archive copies of each of your tweets, in HTML format, before you delete it. These archives will look exactly as they did on x.com, except you'll be the only one with a copy of them.

Choose exactly what you want to delete

You can also choose exactly which tweets you want to delete. For example, you can tell Cyd to delete tweets older than 30 days unless they have at least 100 retweets or likes. Or, you can tell Cyd to delete everything.

Cyd's business model

Cyd's business model is simple. It's a free app, and it includes optional premium features for a cheap annual subscription.

With the free tier, you can save backups of your tweets, retweets, likes, and direct messages, and you can delete all of your tweets. You can use Cyd to delete as much of your data as you want from as many of your accounts as you want. You don't need to even sign up for a Cyd account to use the free features.

With a premium plan, you have the option to keep some of your tweets instead of deleting everything – for example, if you want to delete most of your tweets, but keep the ones that went viral. You'll also be able to have Cyd automatically unfollow everyone, and delete all of your likes and direct messages. Premium plans cost $36 per year (which is $3 per month).

If you run a business or an organization and would like to give your employees premium Cyd accounts as a benefit (ehem, newsrooms, I'm looking at you), then Cyd for Teams is for you. Cyd for Teams isn't available quite yet but it will be soon! Email hi@lockdown.systems if you're interested.

20% off with code CLAWBACKYOURDATA

Because of the nature of how Cyd works, there will be bugs that are impossible to uncover without many different people trying to delete their tweets. (It turns out, writing software that controls a web browser on someone else's computer is a thousand times more complicated than using an API on a server.)

Because of this, it's only fair to give early adopters a discount while we're squashing the bugs that show themselves during the first month. Use coupon code CLAWBACKYOURDATA for 20% off your first year of a Premium plan. It's valid until December 31, 2024.

When you're ready to claw back your data from Big Tech, download Cyd.