Yesterday, Twitter said that they will start deleting inactive accounts as from next month. The deletion would eventually lead to these accounts being available again.
That decision made sense in a way since Twitter wants to have a network with a lot of active user accounts. Dormant accounts are not a good sign for them. However, this process ignored a very huge downside: Some of these accounts are from deceased people.
People have semantic attachments to tweets that were done by dead people since they are regarded as cherished memories of them. Twitter is now acknowledging this and they are making changes.
In a tweetstorm, Twitter said that they won’t be removing inactive accounts as of now. “We’ve heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part. We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorize accounts,” they said.
However, this does not apply to everyone. The company said that their campaign to delete inactive accounts will impact accounts in the EU only due to the GDPR. They also said that they will enforce their inactivity policy in the future to comply with other regulations around the world.
This is a short turnaround to such a big campaign by Twitter. They are now back to the drawing board which means you can rest for now, unless if you’re in the EU. We are also curious as to how they will create a way to “memorialize accounts” but we have to wait and see.
