I Just Deleted My Entire Social Media Presence Before Visiting The Us – And I’ma Citizen

Column We don’t want to believe what we deeply understand: nothing is really deleted, and someone, somewhere can (and probably will) use that record against us.

It’s possible that someone and somewhere will be a Customs and Border Protection agent and a US airport, because now we’ve all heard a story of how agents have prevented a few unlucky souls from entering the USA – after spending hours or days in a holding cell – because of some post or other activity that someone decided made them unfit to cross the border.

Now that’s it’s happening, what can we do?

For what it’s worth, I just pulled the plug on my much-beloved Mastodon account…

Mastodon account deletion notice – Click to enlarge

…as part of a more comprehensive effort to sanitize my online presence.

First I deleted all the hookup apps on my phone, before binning random and never used social apps like Periscope (remember them?) and Snap.

Next, three years after I rage-quit Twitter, I “deactivated” my account. I haven’t checked, but assume new management changed its terms of service so xAI can continue use my nearly 300,000 tweets to train the next iteration of MechaHitler.

2025 was the year when was when it all changed. When socials transformed from self-expression to entrapment

I also assume that if I rejoined Facebook – 15 years after I got the measure of Mark Zuckerberg and “deactivated” my account – Meta would offer to restore all my past posts and connections.

Oh yes, we’ve created quite a record of ourselves.

As I continued my purge, I went through the last few years of photos and scrubbed anything I felt might even be moderately provocative or offensive to anyone who might be looking. That screenshot of a news article? That random bit of art that I photographed? That poster? That face? I scrubbed them all.

Friends note that I’ve got an American passport – what could possibly go wrong?

I don’t know, I reply. But it seems sensible to reduce my attack surface. So the photos go into the memory hole, and finally, my Mastodon account, my alternative to the radioactive bonfire socials of Twitter, small and humble and very much allergic to Nazis. Hitting that “delete” button hurt. But it had to happen.

Remember the year: 2025 was when it all changed. When socials transformed from self-expression to entrapment. From now on, every word you write and every photo and video and podcast you post will be analyzed, weighed, and judged for something far more sinister than targeted advertising.

Didn’t we always knew this day would come? As soon as we started leaving social tracings on the internet – all the way back, 45 years, to Usenet – we knew our own words could come back to haunt us. When that was just “other people,” we never cared very much and kept on sh*tposting. Now that more powerful entities have become increasingly watchful, we find ourselves careful, censorious of ourselves, and of others.

We pray to be forgotten, so that when a border agent says, “Papers, please?” they find nothing of note to indicate that you’re the wrong kind of person. That’s not new. Our complicity in compiling the record used against us, that part is.

I don’t have any simple solutions. I don’t think there are any. The only thing that can save us from this is our own agency. We have decide to reject the lure of “total information awareness” – and not just once, but on every occasion, hundreds of times a day.

Before you read this, I will have presented myself at the US border – all shiny and clean and newly sanitized – where I will flash my US passport and smile. They’ll let me in. Unless someone somewhere has a dataset that wasn’t deleted, and instead got integrated into a profiling database that an ICE agent has at their fingertips. Something that tips the scales toward a deeper examination of my suitability.

Until I make it through the gates at immigration, I won’t know whether any of this flurry of self-censoring means anything more than a way to manage my fear and paranoia.

And I suspect that’s the point of it. ®

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