Ex-Bush aide launches app to scrub social media

A former aide to Jeb Bush is trying to help people avoid becoming the next casualty of social media.

Ethan Czahor was briefly a technology aide to former Bush’s (R) presidential campaign-in-waiting, but resigned earlier this year after it was discovered he had sent tweets disparaging women.

{mosads}His new app, Clear, aims to make sure other people don’t meet the same fate. Clear, which launched in public beta on Monday, scans social media posts on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for posts that could prove detrimental to the writer’s reputation later in life.

“This is something that is going to be a bigger problem and a worse problem for everyone in the future,” he said, noting that millennials are the first generation to have a huge chunk of their lives preserved online.

He said that around 500 people had already signed up to use the app, which was letting users in slowly to avoid overloading the app’s servers. The whole application was programmed by Czahor.

Time was the first to report on the launch.

Czahor’s fall from prized hire to former staffer played out earlier this year, and over the course of less than two days.

In early February, Bush’s Right to Rise political action committee — widely seen as a group designed to help him build the infrastructure for a presidential run — announced Czahor had been hired to lead the group’s technical operations. 

Technical hires for campaigns are being closely watched in an era where being able to process and use massive amounts of data has become a prerequisite for winning the presidency.

Reporters and opposition researchers quickly found Czahor had once tweeted that “college female art majors are sluts, science majors are sluts but uglier.”

In addition to using the word “slut” elsewhere, Czahor made a joke that appeared to be disparaging to gay men. He resigned just one day after the firestorm began.

Czahor told Time that the tweets were written as jokes and were taken “out of context,” and emphasized that his app is not intended to help people cover up hateful comments.

The “vast majority of people who will find this useful will be the ones who said something in the past, but in the future looking back, it’s just not what they meant to say or it didn’t come out right,” he told The Hill.

Other political operatives have been felled by their old social media posts in recent months as well. Also in February, an aide to former-Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) left his office after it was found he had sent out racially charged messages on Facebook.

Czahor said on Monday that he does not have any plans to turn his app into the next high-value startup.

“I had a very well-crafted plan with what I wanted to do with my life and then it kind of blew up in my face, so I’m just kind of going with the flow,” he said. “We’ll see where it takes me.”

— This story was updated at 5:05 p.m.