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"IsDeleted"'s existence is the biggest lie tech companies tell media government and consumers alike.

I wouldn't be so sure. As a developer I've used a similar strategy to make restoring important data easier that occasionally would be deleted by mistake. This wasn't private information though.

Also, I have zero confidence that any of the big tech companies thoroughly delete data they've obtained even if it's illegal to keep. Big tech companies aren't exactly known for following the law. While GDPR sounds nice in theory, the U.S. based companies might "delete" the data from E.U. servers, but conveniently keep backups in the U.S. Or they might forget to pass on the delete request to trusted third-parties.

I can see deleting some of this data is probably non-trivial too, given that if you want to keep the data consistent you have to recursively follow all the relationships between objects and delete related objects too. For example, delete a post, and you have to recursively fetch all comments and delete those, and then all replies to comments, etc.

It's definitely doable and if they're not currently doing that because they choose not to for sure, though deletion of highly-relational data like this is an interesting problem, idk I wanted to bring it up (:

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