How to orphan an online account

Here is a way of ensuring it is, at least, very hard to recover an account you’ve used on some social media platform where either you want the old content to remain publicly visible or the platform doesn’t let you delete accounts in any reasonable way.

So, you want to walk away from whichever tentacle of the creeping undead horror that the internet has become in 2025 has engulfed you. But you either want to leave the things you said in place as some kind of terrible warning to those who might come after you, or for some entirely obvious reason the nazi plutocrats who now rule the world want to make it very hard to erase your account.

Good. But you are scared that you might weaken: the addiction is never cured, only in remission. Here is what I do to make sure it is extremely hard to relapse¹.

1. Make an ephemeral email address. There are lots of places which let you create such addresses which forward to your real address. It is critical that you can delete such an address on demand, and that the addresses, once deleted, cannot ever be recreated. Depending on how things work it may also matter that you can send mail from this address.
2. Change the email address associated with the account to this ephemeral address. Go through any round-trip requirements to verify that the address is yours.
3. Change or remove any other contact details. If the account requires you to round-trip these you’ll need, for instance, a burner SIM for a phone number. If you have to use other fake details don’t write them down.
4. Change the password on the account to a long, random string. You can use my tool, but there are many others available. Do not use a passphrase as you might remember it, and do not write the password down.
5. Delete the ephemeral address, and destroy the SIM card if you had to use one.

You are done.