Social Media Demolition

Done. All of it. The rule was download and sort BEFORE deleting anything, and I held to it.

What came back. 9,687 files. 12.72 GB. 389,508 structured rows, normalized into 219 standardized CSVs covering 2008 through 2026. Here is the scale of what these platforms had quietly been keeping:

- Google Takeout: 5,609 files across 43 separate services. Photos, 4.8 GB of Gmail, 5,670 YouTube watches, 12,317 days of Fit data, Contacts, Calendar, Keep, Maps, Chrome, Chat, Pay, and 30 more.
- Facebook: 3,005 files, 65,813 rows. 1,583 posts going back to 2006, 866 message threads holding 32,376 messages, 572 friends, plus events, groups, and marketplace history.
- Spotify: 64,232 audio streams. Thirteen years of listening, down to the timestamp.
- Amazon: 2,729 orders, 1,586 Prime Video views, 1,107 searches, and a Customer360 AI profile they had built of me.
- LinkedIn: 993 connections and 5,833 ad clicks. They logged every one.
- Apple Health and WHOOP: 540,315 health records and 24,086 WHOOP rows between them.
- Plus Discord, Reddit, Instagram (two accounts), Uber, Steam, Xbox, Audible, PayPal, Chase, Fidelity, 1Password, Microsoft, SoFi, ChatGPT, and Withings.

The normalization is the actual work. Raw exports are 23 different opinions about what a file should look like. Every processed CSV got lowercase underscore headers, consistent naming, UTF-8 throughout, and a data catalog identifying every date column. The one that bit me: most platforms stamp timestamps in UTC, I live in Eastern, so a naive read makes my late-night YouTube habit look like an afternoon one. Every time-series file got an ET-converted column. Peak YouTube hour, corrected: 2am.

What I threw away on purpose. Facebook's ad profiles, IP and device logs, and login tracking. Discord's ML modeling folders. Amazon's advertising data. LinkedIn's ad targeting files. That is their data about me, not my data. It went in the trash.

Then I cross-referenced it. 4,650 transactions merged from Chase, Amazon, Uber Eats, and Uber Rides into one spending file. 142 people who exist on both Facebook and LinkedIn, 26 on all three. 1,155 days of sleep lined up against food ordering behavior. My Facebook activity peaked at 1,222 interactions in 2015 and hit 11 in 2026, which is its own kind of answer.

Then I deleted the accounts. One at a time, platform by platform, which is insanely tedious by design. Every platform has a different waiting period, a different confirmation email, a different dark pattern trying to talk you out of it. I used Claude to track which requests were pending and when the 20 and 30 day confirmation windows came back due. That is the unglamorous part nobody mentions: deletion is not a click, it is a project with a calendar.

The archive is backed up twice and verified byte-perfect. A flash drive that lives in a vault, plus Google Drive. The first copy failed because a 4.77 GB Gmail mbox is bigger than FAT32 allows. Reformatted to exFAT, recopied, zero failures.

Was it worth it? More than I expected. Most of those platforms were attention theft with a login screen. I want to choose how I spend my attention and how my data gets monetized, and now I do. Reddit included.

The one exception: I made a single-purpose Facebook account for Marketplace, because buying and selling locally is genuinely useful and there is no real alternative. It is attached to none of my actual data. That is the deal I am willing to make.

I will happily keep being a weirdo about this.