At around 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy- and information-freedom-focused programmer named Micah Lee learned, to his shock, that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on the competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the location of the private jet of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk—a link that Musk would later claim amounted to “doxing” despite the jet’s location info being publicly available.
For a moment, Lee grieved the loss of an account he’d spent years building, with more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling was replaced with relief to have escaped a platform he felt was already in precipitous moral decline. Since Musk had taken it over two months earlier, Twitter’s new owner had already allowed previously banned far-right and even neo-Nazi figures back onto the service in the name of free speech—while simultaneously axing the accounts of leftists. Perhaps getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul behind those partisan decisions was “a good way to go,” Lee decided.
He hasn’t looked 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 that he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, after Twitter had become X, he wrote a few messages promoting a book he’d written—all now deleted, too—and says he has barely touch the service otherwise. “Honestly, my mental health is much better since then,” he adds.
Now, Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw back Your Data”—a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming 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 itself, or you can use X’s built-in 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, like erasing the contents of their account with more fine-grained filters based on variables like date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, un-retweeting or removing likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing all X users.
While Cyd for now is designed specifically for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features for carrying out the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms that we use all the time and where we have all our data,” Lee says. “I want to basically make it so that the users of these platforms—everybody else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires—has a bit more power.”