Jeb Bush’s CTO Was Fired for His Questionable Tweets. His New App Will Help Delete Yours.

Daniel Howley
·Technology Editor
Updated
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In February, Ethan Czahor lost his job as CTO for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign when his years-old offensive blog posts and tweets were uncovered by the media and opposition researchers.

Now, just two months later, Czahor is back with an app to help others avoid a similar fate. Clear, which is currently available for iOS, uses search algorithms to peruse your social media accounts for any potentially offensive posts and flags them for you to delete.

You can sign up to use the app now, though when I tried it this morning I was met with a waiting list.

Clear works with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To use it, you simply have to link your social account to the app, and then the app goes to work. Clear’s site doesn’t explain how it finds posts beyond simply saying that it gets some form of assistance from IBM’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, Watson.

The app is certainly a good idea, considering that many teens and college students use social media and likely post things that they will regret when they graduate to adulthood.

But it’s how the app came to be that’s really interesting. You see, Czahor, who sold his first startup, Hipster, to AOL in 2012, was hired by Jeb Bush’s team in February to serve as its chief technology officer.

Less than two days later he resigned when the folks at BuzzFeed and opposition researchers found a series of racially insensitive blog posts and misogynistic tweets from as far back as 2009.

On Clear’s website, Czahor says the tweets were posted in jest, as he was studying at the improv comedy school the Groundlings at the time. There’s no mention of his blog posts, though.

And for what it’s worth, Clear’s site does include links to stories regarding his resignation that aren’t exactly flattering.

There’s a seemingly endless number of stories about people getting in trouble at their jobs, or in politics, for writing insensitive posts on social media. Clear may help someone avoid that fate.

But there’s already a much easier method to ensure that your old potentially offensive posts don’t come back to haunt you: Don’t write them in the first place.

You can check out Clear in the iTunes App Store.

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+.