Taylor Swift didn't delete her social media accounts. She did something much smarter.

Taylor Swift’s social media accounts are among the most popular on their respective channels. Her Twitter has 85.4 million followers, her Instagram 102 million and her Facebook 72 million.

But as of this weekend, all those ‘Swifties’ have nothing to look at. No posts, no statuses, no pictures, no videos of Meredith Grey and Olivia Benson (TayTay’s cats).

It’s not that she’s deleted them.

The accounts are still there, but the pages have been purged.

via GIPHY

Some are speculating the blackout is the 28-year-old’s way of digitally detoxing after her highly publicised civil sexual assault case. Some are saying she’s been hacked. Some are pointing to the release of her anticipated sixth album.

And most aren’t coping.

We can all take some solace in the fact that her pages have been wiped rather than just deactivated or – God forbid – deleted.

But how did she do it?

After all, neither Facebook nor Instagram nor Twitter provide an ‘erase everything’ function – all that data simply means too much to them.

So if you want to pull a Swifty and spring clean your account without losing your followers, you’ll have to rely on third-party tools to make it happen. Tools like these:

Facebook Post Manager

According to Gizmodo, this free Chrome browser extension is the slickest slate-cleaning option out there for Facebook.

A few clicks and you can wipe the lot – likes, comments, shares, wall messages, pictures.

But if you’re not quite ready for total destruction, it also allows you to erase a specific, regrettable period in your online life by batch-deleting groups of posts according month, year, even keyword (eg. “cheating bastard” or “Nickelback”).

Bonus, it’s entirely free.

Cardigan

It looks a little rustic, but this free tool is surprisingly competent at handling your tweet deleting needs. Simply visit the Cardigan website, sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will fetch your tweets.

You can order the results by date, filter by tweet type (eg. just retweets or replies), and search for specific words, hashtags or usernames.

The simply delete at will; even all at once, if you’re so inclined.

Depending on how many tweets you have to ditch it will take anywhere from a few seconds to several hours to complete the job.

But keep in mind, Twitter’s restrictions mean that most services like these can only access your 3200 most recent tweets.

Cleaner

There are fewer options out there for Instagram overhaul, and while Android app Instant Cleaner for Instagram by Aurora C. Labs is more popular, this app is available on the Apple App Store as well.

You can batch-delete up to 50 posts for free, before you have to fork out for the Pro version.

Instagram places limits on how many actions can be performed on an account at once – 50 per hour, up to 1000 per day. So it can be slow going if you’re #instahappy.