- New feature can edit reddit items with random gibberish a random amount of times to throw off archival services.
- New feature will edit your reddit items but not delete them to throw off archival services.
What is this?
I’m excited to release 1.2.0 of my side project, Social Amnesia! This completely free and open source software allows you to wipe out old reddit and twitter posts, comments, tweets, and favorites, automatically and on a schedule. It also allows you to configure certain items to be saved based on configuration options like number of upvotes, favorites, or retweets, whether an item has been gilded, how old an item is, or by specifically whitelisting items you would like to have saved.
Who is this for?
I assume most of you are wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook (if you even have one), etc. However, I can also imagine many of your friends and family are not. At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is to not use any social media. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say no". What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. This is why I've built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively (instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you).
Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work with scary configuration text files) or cost money. I wanted to develop one that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. I believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.
Why would you need this?
If you've been following the news recently you've probably seen cases of celebrities losing out on big career opportunities because of tweets or other internet posts from their past coming back to haunt them. Kevin Hart and The Oscars and James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are two of the more high profile examples of this recently. Make no mistake, this could happen to anyone, not just high profile individuals. If you are going to tweet, cleaning up your old tweets is one of the best ways to keep a nightmare like this from ruining a potential job opportunity or relationship. Since twitter is mainly focused on current events, and as far as I can tell it's rare for people to look far back in someone's twitter history, this shouldn't effect your day to day interaction with twitter.
On the reddit side of things, many people maintain pseudonymous accounts to post in places like /r/sex, /r/politics or /r/trees. The more reddit history you have, the higher chance you have of being doxxed by someone who might comb through your posts to try and scrape together details to de-cloak you and reveal your real identity. Keeping your reddit history clean is a good deterrent from being doxxed.
Concerns
I've received concerns about this software when I've posted it before. I'll try my best to detail some of my arguments here, but please leave a comment if you have anything to share and I'll do my best to respond to you. One of the main concerns I've heard is from people who've gone back to an old reddit post and there have been deleted comments that might have been useful for them (semi-relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/9...
Cool idea, but no Linux support and only Twitter and Reddit? Does it work by simulating user activity? I'd be worried about anything using the API that would trigger some internal alert/archival due to thinking it is a bot trying to remove evidence. I think the biggest thing to keep people safe is not to post under their real identity, and try to use a service (VPN, proxy, etc) that doesn't trace back to you. Web browsers are pretty guilty here in terms of what they permit to be tracked by default using JS that can almost immediately identify a user based on browser version/OS/etc.
It's built in Python, it's pretty simple for a Linux user to run it (I have instructions on the readme that explain how to do so from the command line). I just haven't built an executable for Linux because of how many different Linux OS there are out there in use.
And yeah, only Twitter and Reddit right now, the next plans are to get Instagram working with this.
I have previously used Shame Eraser [0] for this, which uses your Twitter Archive [1] to get all of the status IDs so you don't run into rate limiting problems. I was able to delete 87k tweets in a few hours a couple years ago with it. Is this software just as fast?
Wow, I didn't even think about using a twitter archive to delete everything. This will help me get around the 3.2k API limit problem I was experiencing. I'll work on integrating this.
Its just security theater though. Every popular website has scripts saving every comment that gets posted as well as users manually mirroring content to archive websites. The real solution is anonymity. You may regret saying something stupid years ago but who cares if no one can link it to your present self.
Unfortunately it's not actually possible to delete reddit comments from being publicly searchable. There are several independent projects which continuously retrieve and store every single comment. For example, PushShift[1] constantly crawls reddit for all new comments and posts. Their entire corpus of historical data is freely available for download. There is even a free service to search through any user's entire comment and submission history[2]. This includes deleted comments and deleted users.
Fair warning, I use tools like masstagger, pushshift, and redusa to analyze users when deciding if a ban is appropriate. It's not difficult for anyone to still read over 99% of your deleted comments.
Reddit should ban these kinda tools, a lot of useful threads become unreadable. Maybe some tool to dissociate your identity from the content made by reddit itself would be better.
Usage of this kinda tool always smacks of "screw you guys i'm going home" to me, i invariably have to resort to some sort of undelete/wayback service focused on reddit to see what the thread conversation was about esp when it was about a technical topic/ info only that niche community care about(a recent one i had was about rha headphones, half the thread was full of these "i deleted my reddit presence coz reasons etc etc" comments
25 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] threadWhat's new?
- New feature can edit reddit items with random gibberish a random amount of times to throw off archival services.
- New feature will edit your reddit items but not delete them to throw off archival services.
What is this?
I’m excited to release 1.2.0 of my side project, Social Amnesia! This completely free and open source software allows you to wipe out old reddit and twitter posts, comments, tweets, and favorites, automatically and on a schedule. It also allows you to configure certain items to be saved based on configuration options like number of upvotes, favorites, or retweets, whether an item has been gilded, how old an item is, or by specifically whitelisting items you would like to have saved.
Who is this for?
I assume most of you are wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook (if you even have one), etc. However, I can also imagine many of your friends and family are not. At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is to not use any social media. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say no". What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. This is why I've built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively (instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you).
Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work with scary configuration text files) or cost money. I wanted to develop one that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. I believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.
Why would you need this?
If you've been following the news recently you've probably seen cases of celebrities losing out on big career opportunities because of tweets or other internet posts from their past coming back to haunt them. Kevin Hart and The Oscars and James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are two of the more high profile examples of this recently. Make no mistake, this could happen to anyone, not just high profile individuals. If you are going to tweet, cleaning up your old tweets is one of the best ways to keep a nightmare like this from ruining a potential job opportunity or relationship. Since twitter is mainly focused on current events, and as far as I can tell it's rare for people to look far back in someone's twitter history, this shouldn't effect your day to day interaction with twitter.
On the reddit side of things, many people maintain pseudonymous accounts to post in places like /r/sex, /r/politics or /r/trees. The more reddit history you have, the higher chance you have of being doxxed by someone who might comb through your posts to try and scrape together details to de-cloak you and reveal your real identity. Keeping your reddit history clean is a good deterrent from being doxxed.
Concerns
I've received concerns about this software when I've posted it before. I'll try my best to detail some of my arguments here, but please leave a comment if you have anything to share and I'll do my best to respond to you. One of the main concerns I've heard is from people who've gone back to an old reddit post and there have been deleted comments that might have been useful for them (semi-relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/9...
And yeah, only Twitter and Reddit right now, the next plans are to get Instagram working with this.
[0]: https://github.com/benjaminjackson/shame-eraser
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-dow...
This is probably where all social platforms will eventually end up, whether they like or not.
_____________
1. https://pushshift.io/
2. http://redditsearch.io/
Usage of this kinda tool always smacks of "screw you guys i'm going home" to me, i invariably have to resort to some sort of undelete/wayback service focused on reddit to see what the thread conversation was about esp when it was about a technical topic/ info only that niche community care about(a recent one i had was about rha headphones, half the thread was full of these "i deleted my reddit presence coz reasons etc etc" comments