Twitter Suspends Plan To Delete Inactive Accounts

The news that Twitter would be deleting inactive accounts made waves online. Scores of people tweeted to protest the abrupt announcements, demanding that the accounts of their deceased loved-ones should remain live. Certainly not the best start to a Thanksgiving weekend.

That was something Twitter did not anticipate. On Tuesday, Twitter tweeted an apology, stating it would no longer be deleting any accounts until there was a solution to preserve ones from users who have died. Twitter had sent emails on Tuesday warning users that accounts which hadn’t been used for more than six months would be removed if they weren’t logged into by December 11.

Twitter does have an inactive account policy, but it is not “consistently” enforced, according to the tweet thread. Facebook does have a way to memorialize deceased users, and Twitter says it’s now working on a way it can do the same.

This impacts accounts in the EU only, for now. We’ve always had an inactive account policy but we haven’t enforced it consistently. We’re starting with the EU in part due to local privacy regulations (eg, GDPR).

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 27, 2019

“We’ve heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part,” tweeted Twitter. “We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorialize accounts.”