I'm highly skeptical that anything on social media ever gets deleted, it is saved to catalogue your actions and choices, which later can all be easily pulled up on a dashboard to view your characteristics at any time, especially if you gain popularity, wealth, or notoriety.<p>We're at a point where private companies can easily amass enough data to blackmail individuals, or to subtly influence and manipulate them. These are dark times.<p>We really have to come to a realistic understanding that the algorithms serve the purpose of making platforms profit more so than the role of showing us the best and most suited content to us as individuals... When each account can advertise/promote posts on platforms, it becomes less of an algorithm recommending content to us, and more of a system on rails, where most of what we're being shown is content that has been sponsored to be played for us.<p>This is why search results are often hobbled and handicapped on large content sites like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok... Even the search results rely upon most viewed content, which can easily be garnered and skewed by individuals and companies that pay to promote their content. We need to stop fooling ourselves into the ideal that we have control over what we see on large-scale content platforms. It's chaotically scripted in most cases and, more often than not, driven by those who contribute the most cash to the advertising machines that platforms build, and by what the platforms pick to drive that revenue.