Ethan Czahor may have lost his dream job due to the resurfacing of some offensive tweets, but now the well-known techie has launched an app to help other people clean up their social media before it lands them in a compromising position.
Czahor decided to resign from his position as Jeb Bush’s chief technology officer back in February when a series of tweets referring to women as “sluts” and accusing gay men of undressing him “with their eyes” in the gym resurfaced on the Web.
Bush’s team stood behind Czahor, but he ultimately still decided to step down and embark on a journey to protect social media users from the nightmares of their digital past with a new app called Clear.
The app uses an algorithm to scan through users’ social media posts and dig up all the posts that could be offensive and get them in trouble with employers and other professionals.
The app will present users with a complete list of tweets that contain racial slurs or other types of offensive language and give them the option to erase the post forever — if screenshots aren’t already floating around on the web.
Czahor said after his own tweets ended in a career tragedy, he received messages from a lot of people who were afraid the same thing would happen to them.
“Right after what I went through I received a lot of messages from people worried what happened to me would happen to them,” he told BuzzFeed.
Now a “Clear score” can help people figure out if they are truly at risk or not.
It sounds like a handy app, but it’s also come with a lot of backlash considering the fact that it is essentially helping people hide what could be sexist, racist or otherwise incredibly offensive social media posts.
“How about you just don’t use offensive language,” one Twitter user wrote as a response to the app.
That’s how many people felt about the new app, but in all fairness there are cases where the app could truly help people who don’t deserve to be fired or miss out on job opportunities.
In today’s spectrum of political correctness and self-appointed offensive police filling social media, there actually are instances where social media messages are taken out of context and cost people their jobs.
In some cases, being “offensive” has been redefined as expressing a different opinion that doesn’t fit the status quo, which sometimes seems to be in direct opposition of America’s so-called loyalty to the freedom of speech.
While it’s easy to see that Czahor’s own tweets stepped well beyond that boundary, the Clear app could still be a handy tool for those who maybe haven’t learned the correct etiquette for social media postings.
More often than not, those bits intended to be comedic relief can land people in serious trouble down the road or the daring decision to question a widespread belief could leave people being labeled as intolerant or ignorant. Clear helps flag down such messages so users can make the final call on whether or not they would feel comfortable defending their social media posts in the public eye.
Either way, people will have to wait quite some time to test the app out as it has already garnered a waiting list well beyond 10,000 people.
No word out yet on how long it will take for those on the waiting list to finally get their Clear report.