Jeb Staffer Fired For Offensive Tweets Makes App To Catch Offensive Tweets

ILLUSTRATION - Auf dem Display eines iphone 6 wird am 20.03.2015 die App "Twitter" als icon angezeigt. Photo by: Britta Pedersen/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
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Ethan Czahor, the former chief technology officer for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) who was fired for offensive tweets, has created an app to catch offensive tweets and similar content.

Czahor served as the CTO for Bush for about 36 hours before getting fired after reports surfaced of eyebrow-raising tweets he wrote. One of Czahor’s tweets said “new study confirms old belief: college female art majors are sluts, science majors are also sluts but uglier.” Another tweet said “when I burp in the gym i feel like it’s my way of saying, “sorry guys, but i’m not gay.”

A couple of months later Czahor has returned with a new app, called Clear, released Monday. Clear sifts through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, searching for content that could be damaging to the user. The idea is to save the user from being associated with regrettable comments and content from the past.

“This could happen to anyone in any field —it doesn’t have to be politics— every millennial is now entering the workforce, and maybe even a senior position, and everything that they’ve said online for the last 10 years is still there, and that’s a new thing for this generation,” Czahor told TIME.

According to TIME, the app searches for specific words like “black” or “gay” and also goes through a sentiment analysis by the IBM supercomputer Watson. The user then gets a Clear analysis score that measures how much offensive content is on the user’s networking platforms.

“The most challenging part of this is determining which tweets are actually offensive, and that’s something that will take a while to get really good at,” Czahor said.

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Notable Replies

  1. The most challenging part of this is determining which tweets are actually offensive

    If you have to have an app to tell you what NOT to say, maybe you shouldn’t be tweeting?

    Seriously.

  2. Did he test it on his tweets first?

  3. Can’t fix stupid. I mean, geez, if you need an app to tell you that you are tweeting something racist or sexist, maybe you shouldn’t be tweeting at all.

  4. Who says you can’t turn a sow’s ear into silk purse?

  5. Avatar for paulw paulw says:

    Because the right thing to do is figure out how to scrub or spin the really offensive things you said, rather than to avoid saying them. Y’know, some of us just never felt it necessary to go public with our despicable opinions of minorities of one kind or another. Perhaps even because we didn’t hold such opinions.

    I can’t wait for the list of synonyms that this app is going to need to be anything like effective.

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