How To: Find & Delete Dumb, Offensive Posts on Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter

One tweet can get your fired from your job. At least, in the cases of Gilbert Gottfried, Rashard Mendenhall, Ozzie Guillen, and Mike Bacsik, who were all either fired or forced to resign from their jobs after posting regrettable tweets online.

An ex-GOP aide for Jeb Bush was also forced to resign after reporters found several suggestive posts on Twitter from years back. But instead of letting his mistake define him, Ethan Czahor, the aide in question, decided to do something about the issue of the sometimes crass remarks we make online coming back to haunt us.

Founded by Czahor, Clear is an iOS app that scrubs your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for potentially insensitive posts, allowing you to then delete them from the internet (so long as no one took a screenshot of them, of course). To get started, install Clear from the iOS App Store, then follow along below to see how it works.

Note: The app is currently in beta, so there is a waitlist.

Using your credentials for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, authorize access to Clear for your accounts. Once you go through that, the app will begin to analyze your posts and flag the ones that contain curse words and other keywords such as Mexican, lesbian, gay, and black. IBM's Watson supercomputer also puts in some work by flagging posts that could be deemed "negative" to some.

As you can see below, I was given a -137.2% score, which is obviously not good. I scrolled through hundreds of posts from my Instagram and Facebook that were all marked, mostly for curse words (I recently wiped my entire Twitter, so my score could have been much worse).

You can then either go through the timeline of posts to delete them, or click on one to check out which words were flagged (and also delete it).

The algorithm isn't perfect, and the reason I say that is because not all of my offensive posts were flagged. I found that some of my insensitive posts were not flagged at all, because they either didn't contain curse words or "negative" keywords. Other posts of mine were flagged, but with keywords such as hipster, bath bomb, bar hopping and ratchet, all of which weren't used in bad context (not sure how bar hopping got in there, haha). Czahor said he's working to improve the algorithm, as well as shift the Clear score to something more along the lines of a 0-100 scale.

As for someone who posts insensitive things online from time to time, this is a great tool to go back and delete the ones that could get me in to trouble. We all post something we regret at one time or another (some of us,more than others), whether it's because we're blinded by anger or we're just really passionate about a hot topic issue.

But it doesn't mean that we should lose our jobs over it. And that's why Clear is here to help.

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