Microblogging online platform, Twitter has announced that users whose accounts have been inactive for more than 6 months will be removed from its server or database.
The company started sending out emails to owners of inactive accounts with a warning “sign in by December 11th, or your account will be history” Twitter mentioned their action according to their own inactive accounts policy.
Hello,
To continue using Twitter, you’ll need to agree to the current Terms, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Use. This not only lets you make the best decisions about the information that you share with us, it also allows you to keep using your Twitter account. But first, you need to log in and follow the on-screen prompts before Dec. 11, 2019, otherwise your account will be removed from Twitter.
This news carries both good news and bad news -starting from the old users, when you receive this mail from Twitter via the email you signed up with, you are advised to sign in to the account and follow Twitter’s instructions.
Note that, these affected users will receive email from Twitter. They are expected to comply before 11th of December, and if they don’t go by the rules, the company will remove their handles from their server.
It is still advisable for all the current users on Twitter to sign in few days to the 11th of December. This is to ensure that, your account is active, unless you are always logged in.
But on the other hand, when Twitter has done the deletion of those usernames or handles from their server, the usernames will be made available to the public.
Although, as of the time of publishing this article, Twitter hasn’t mentioned any date as to when they will release those usernames to the public.
Of course, this move by Twitter won’t only affect the users who has abandoned their accounts, but it also affects the deceased users. After all, Twitter does not memorialize someones account once they are dead.
This is totally unlike Facebook, where a family or closed friend can either request to memorialize or remove an account of a deceased user. Anyways, Twitter said they are working on that.
Update: 27th of November, Twitter said they want to memorialize dead users, which results to the stoppage of removal of any inactive accounts of 6-months.
Which means that Twitter has stopped the plans of removing inactive accounts, as they want to memorialize dead users, like Facebook. Twitter has apologized for confusion around its plan to remove accounts.
