He Got Banned From X. Now He Wants to Help You Escape, Too

At round 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy- and information-freedom-focused programmer named Micah Lee realized, to his shock, that he had simply been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a hyperlink to @Elonjets, an account on the competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the situation of the non-public jet of Twitter’s new billionaire proprietor, Elon Musk—a hyperlink that Musk would later declare amounted to “doxing” regardless of the jet’s location information being publicly obtainable.

For a second, Lee grieved the lack of an account he’d spent years constructing, with greater than 50,000 followers. Then, nearly instantly, that feeling was changed with aid to have escaped a platform he felt was already in precipitous ethical decline. Since Musk had taken it over two months earlier, Twitter’s new proprietor had already allowed beforehand banned far-right and even neo-Nazi figures again onto the service within the identify of free speech—whereas concurrently axing the accounts of leftists. Maybe getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul behind these partisan choices was “a great way to go,” Lee determined.

He hasn’t seemed again. Twitter ultimately instructed Lee he might return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. As an alternative, he stayed off the platform for eight months earlier than lastly deleting that submit, however solely in order that he might log in and delete his whole historical past on the platform. A number of months later, after Twitter had change into X, he wrote just a few messages selling a book he’d written—all now deleted, too—and says he has barely contact the service in any other case. “Actually, my psychological well being is significantly better since then,” he provides.

Now, Lee desires that will help you obtain that very same cleaning launch. Right this moment, he launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw again Your Information”—a desktop software designed to provide customers extra management over their X historical past: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether. Within the free model of Cyd, this system permits anybody to obtain their X posts—Cyd can save as much as 2,000 of your most up-to-date posts itself, or you should utilize X’s built-in characteristic that means that you can obtain your whole archive—after which routinely delete them. For $36 a 12 months, customers can entry Cyd’s premium options, like erasing the contents of their account with extra fine-grained filters based mostly on variables like date, variety of likes or retweets, or key phrases, un-retweeting or eradicating likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing all X customers.

Whereas Cyd for now’s designed particularly for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says he hopes to ultimately add different options for finishing up the identical archiving and deletion features on companies like Fb and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos management all of the platforms that we use on a regular basis and the place we’ve all our knowledge,” Lee says. “I need to mainly make it in order that the customers of those platforms—everyone else who is not certainly one of these actually wealthy tech billionaires—has a bit extra energy.”