Go to the first post from anyone in the world on the social network of your choice, and you will probably be very entertained, appalled or both. These days, babies practically come out the womb knowing how to tweet.
However, there was a time when no one really knew how to use this thing called social media, so having a new platform to say anything and everything may have produced some, shall we say, interesting posts during those early days.
You see it all the time today. Whenever someone gets promoted to a new, high-profile job, we all practically wait for the backlash against him or her to begin when some offensive early tweets or Facebook posts surface.
Take Trevor Noah, for instance. After it was announced that the comedian would be replacing Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Noah was accused of being anti-semitic and sexist for some tweets of his posted a few years ago.
Though Comedy Central ultimately stood by Noah and the controversy seems to have blown over for now, there have been many other high-profile examples like this where people haven't been able to recover so well from their early social media faux pas. They definitely could have used an app like Clear.
This new app, which was just released to the public on Monday, connects to your social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and it will flag any potentially controversial and distasteful posts that could get you into a whole mess of trouble later on. To do this, Clear uses its own algorithms to make note of posts that include words you would expect, such as those four-letter expletives, according to TIME. Clear also performs sentiment analysis on your posts using the IBM Watson supercomputer. You know, the one that killed it on Jeopardy?
Once you know which posts don't make you look so great, you can delete them on Clear, which also deletes them from your social media accounts. This means you don't have to spend hours and hours scrolling through 16,000 tweets to find the (hopefully) few that need to go.
Clear was designed to help those entering or even already in the workforce, who may be unaware that some of the social media posts they have made through the years, could jeopardize their careers. Ethan Czahor, the founder of Clear, knows about that all too well. He resigned from his role as chief technology officer of Jeb Bush's Right to Rise PAC in February after just 36 hours in the position when it was discovered that he made some controversial comments about women and minorities online.
Czahor hopes to expand Clear to analyze emails, personal blogs and search results, citing the Sony email leak that occurred at the end of 2014, he told TIME. You can download the beta version of Clear now for iOS devices.
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