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

At astir 5 p.m. connected a Thursday successful December 2022, a privacy- and information-freedom-focused programmer named Micah Lee learned, to his shock, that helium had conscionable been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a nexus to @Elonjets, an relationship connected the competing societal media work Mastodon that tracked the determination of the backstage pitchy of Twitter’s caller billionaire owner, Elon Musk—a nexus that Musk would aboriginal assertion amounted to “doxing” contempt the jet’s determination info being publically available.

For a moment, Lee grieved the nonaccomplishment of an relationship he'd spent years building, with much than 50,000 followers. Then, astir immediately, that feeling was replaced with alleviation to person escaped a level helium felt was already successful precipitous motivation decline. Since Musk had taken it implicit 2 months earlier, Twitter's caller proprietor had already allowed antecedently banned far-right and adjacent neo-Nazi figures backmost onto the work successful the sanction of escaped speech—while simultaneously axing the accounts of leftists. Perhaps getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul down those partisan decisions was “a bully mode to go,” Lee decided.

He hasn't looked back. Twitter yet told Lee helium could instrumentality to the work if helium deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, helium stayed disconnected the level for 8 months earlier yet deleting that post, but lone truthful that helium could log successful and delete his full past connected the platform. A fewer months later, aft Twitter had go X, helium wrote a fewer messages promoting a publication he'd written—all present deleted, too—and says helium has hardly interaction the work otherwise. “Honestly, my intelligence wellness is overmuch amended since then,” helium adds.

Now, Lee wants to assistance you execute that aforesaid cleansing release. Today, helium launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw backmost Your Data”—a desktop exertion designed to springiness users much power implicit their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, oregon destroying it altogether. In the escaped mentation of Cyd, the programme allows anyone to download their X posts—Cyd tin prevention up to 2,000 of your astir caller posts itself, oregon you tin usage X's built-in diagnostic that allows you to download your full archive—and past automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users tin entree Cyd's premium features, similar erasing the contents of their relationship with much fine-grained filters based connected variables similar date, fig of likes oregon retweets, oregon keywords, un-retweeting oregon removing likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing each X users.

While Cyd for present is designed specifically for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says helium hopes to yet adhd different features for carrying retired the aforesaid archiving and deletion functions connected services similar Facebook and Reddit. “A fistful of billionaires similar Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos power each the platforms that we usage each the clip and wherever we person each our data,” Lee says. “I privation to fundamentally marque it truthful that the users of these platforms—everybody other who isn't 1 of these truly affluent tech billionaires—has a spot much power.”