Major cleanup of inactive Twitter accounts postponed after criticism

Twitter is not yet going to delete inactive accounts after criticism from users. The tech company planned to remove accounts that had not been logged in for more than six months from December 11, but came back to it later in the day.

The criticism focused mainly on the removal of accounts from deceased people. Twitter, unlike Facebook, has no option to give the account an in-memory status. “We went wrong”, the company admits. “We will not delete inactive accounts until we have thought of something so that people can commemorate accounts.” The company will probably not start cleaning on December 11th.

Earlier in the day, Twitter said it would remove the accounts to provide a more accurate and reliable picture.

“As part of this, we encourage people to actively log in and use Twitter when registering,” a spokesperson told tech site The Verge.

It is not clear how many accounts with this promotion will eventually be deleted. It is probably about millions. Twitter’s new policy is currently only applied to accounts of people from the European Union.

Incidentally, it does not mean that many usernames will be released or the follower number will suddenly drop considerably. A spokesperson says the process will take “many months”.

Twitter had 145 million daily active users in the third quarter of this year which it claimed could earn money from. This cleaning will not affect that figure.