Around 5 On a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy- and freedom-of-information-minded programmer named Micah Lee learned, to his shock, that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjetsan account on the competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the location of Twitter’s new billionaire owner Elon Musk’s private jet, a link that Musk later said amounted to “doxing” despite the jet’s location information being publicly available.
For a moment, Lee grieved the loss of an account he had spent years building, with more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling was replaced by relief at having escaped a platform that he felt was already in precipitous moral decline. From Musk had taken it over two months earlierTwitter’s new owner had already allowed previously banned far-right figures and even neo-Nazis to rejoin the service in the name of free speech, while simultaneously deleting left-wing accounts. Maybe getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul behind those partisan decisions was “a good way to go,” Lee decided.
He didn’t look back. Twitter eventually told Lee he could return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead he stayed off the platform for eight months before finally deleting that post, but only so he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, when Twitter had become X, he wrote some promotional messages a book he had written– all now deleted too – and says he’s otherwise barely touched the service. “Honestly, my mental health has improved a lot since then,” he adds.
Now, Lee wants to help you get that same cleansing release. Today, him launched Cyd– an acronym for “Claw back Your Data” – a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, tailoring it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download their X posts: Cyd can save up to 2,000 of your most recent posts on its own, or you can use X’s built-in feature that lets you download your entire archive , and then delete them automatically. For $36 per year, users can access Cyd’s premium features, such as clearing the contents of their account with more detailed filters based on variables such as date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, do not retweet, or remove likes by posting en masse and unfollowing all X users.
While Cyd for now is designed specifically to manage, or empty, your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features to perform the same archiving and deleting 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 all the time and where we store all our data,” Lee says. “I want to basically make sure that the users of these platforms – everyone else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires – have a little bit more power.”
