On a Thursday in December 2022 around 5 p.m., a privacy and information freedom-oriented programmer named Micah Lee was shocked to learn that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on rival 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 Jet's location information being publicly available.
Lee briefly mourned the loss of an account he had worked on for years, with more than 50,000 followers. Then that feeling was almost immediately replaced by the relief of having escaped a platform that he felt was already in steep moral decline. Since Musk took 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 freedom of speech – while simultaneously deleting the accounts of leftists. Perhaps a suspension for insulting the mercurial mogul behind these partisan decisions was “a good choice,” Lee concluded.
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 he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, after Twitter became “Honestly, my mental health has been 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: archive it, customize it to their preferences or destroy it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, anyone can download their X-messages using the program. Cyd itself can store up to 2,000 of your most recent messages, 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 finer-grained filters based on variables such as date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, undoing retweets, or mass deleting likes from posts and unfollowing all X users.
While Cyd is specifically designed for managing (or emptying) your X account for now, 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 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 basically want to make sure that the users of these platforms – everyone else who isn't one of these really rich tech billionaires – gets some more power.”
