At around 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy and freedom-of-information-focused programmer named Micah Lee was shocked to learn that he had been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link @ElonjetsAn account on a competing social media service Mastodon which tracked the location of the private jet of Twitter's new billionaire owner, Elon Musk – a link which Musk later claimed was “doxxing” despite the jet's location information being publicly available.
For a moment, Lee grieved the loss of the account that had taken him years to build, which had more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling of relief at having escaped the stage was replaced by the feeling that she was already in acute moral decline. since Musk took it two months agoTwitter's new owner had already allowed banned far-right and even neo-Nazis to return to the service in the name of free speech — while also shutting down the accounts of leftists. . Perhaps getting banned for offending the aggressive mogul behind those partisan decisions “was a good way to go,” Lee decided.
He did not look back. Twitter eventually told Lee that he could return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, he stayed off the platform for eight months before eventually deleting that post, but only so he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, after Twitter became X, he wrote some messages promoting a book he wrote-Now all deleted, and says he's barely touched the service otherwise. He added, “Honestly, my mental health is much better since then.”
Now, Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, they launched Cyd – short for “Claw Back Your Data” – a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: storing it, trimming it to their preferences, or Destroying it completely. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download their Allows—and then delete them automatically. For $36 per year, users can access Cyd's premium features, such as deleting, un-retweeting, or deleting content from their account with more granular filters based on variables such as date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords. Removing likes from. , and unfollowing all
While Cyd is designed specifically for managing or emptying your X account right now, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features to perform similar archive and deletion tasks on services like Facebook and Reddit. We do. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms we use all the time and where all our data is,” Lee says. “I basically want to make it so that the users of these platforms — everyone else who isn't one of these really rich tech billionaires — have a little more power.”