At around 5 p.m. on Thursday, December 2022, software developer Micah Lee, who focuses on privacy and freedom of information, was surprised to learn that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on rival social media site Mastodon that tracked the location of modern Twitter owner Elon Musk’s private jet – a link that Musk later claimed was “doxing” despite information about the jet’s location being publicly available.
For a moment, Lee mourned the loss of an account he had spent years building and which had over 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, this feeling was replaced by relief that he had managed to escape from a platform that he believed was already in rapid moral decline. Since Musk had taken it over more than two months earlier, the modern owner of Twitter, in the name of freedom of speech, had already allowed previously banned far-right activists and even neo-Nazis to return to the site, while blocking the accounts of leftists. Perhaps getting banned for insulting the mercury tycoon behind these partisan decisions was “a good thing,” Lee decided.
He didn’t look back. Twitter ultimately told Lee he could return to duty if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, he stayed off the platform for eight months before finally deleting the post, but only so he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, when Twitter became X, he wrote some promotional messages the book he wrote— all of which have now been deleted, too — and he claims to have barely touched the service otherwise. “Honestly, my mental state has been much better since then,” he adds.
Now Lee wants to lend a hand you achieve the same cleansing effect. Today he is launched Cyd— an acronym for “Claw back Your Data” — a computer application designed to give users more control over their X-history: archiving it, trimming it to their own preferences, or destroying it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download your X posts – Cyd can save up to 2,000 of your most recent posts on its own, or you can exploit the built-in X feature that allows you to download your entire archive – and then automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users can access Cyd’s premium features, such as deleting account content using more precise filters based on variables such as date, number of likes or retweets or keywords, mass deletion of retweets, or removing likes from posts and you will unfollow all X users.
While Cyd is for now designed specifically to manage – or empty – your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features to perform the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms we use constantly and where we store all our data,” Lee says. “Fundamentally, I want to do this so that the users of these platforms – everyone else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires – have a little more power.”