Elon Musk: Twitter to Put 1.5 Billion Abandoned Handles Up for Grabs

Elon Musk wants to make Twitter usernames a renewable resource. 

“Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts,” the mercurial CEO tweeted(Opens in a new window) last night. “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log in for years.”

As with many of the changes announced but not yet implemented at Twitter since Musk took over the company on Oct. 28, those tweets leave a great deal to the reader’s imagination. 

How many years of inactivity is Musk talking about here? Great question! Musk has yet to answer dozens of tweets asking for clarity on that point(Opens in a new window), although he did have time Friday to tweet back to such luminaries as @catturd2 and @cb_doge. 

Can there really be one and a half billion long-dormant Twitter accounts? That seems like a lot, considering that it reported only 237.8 million monetizable daily active users in its second quarter(Opens in a new window), its last as a publicly traded company. 

But it seems to check out. Reports from 2010(Opens in a new window) and 2014(Opens in a new window) estimated that around 80% of Twitter users were inactive. And former platform director Ryan Sarver, who worked at the company through June 2013, recently told Cartoon Avatars podcast host Logan Bartlett(Opens in a new window) that the number of people who had tried Twitter and quit “was over a billion back when I was there.” (That moment comes about an hour into the Nov. 12 episode of that Bay Area venture capitalist’s podcast.)

The trickiest question here, however, is how this new policy will intersect with the accounts of dead people, because Twitter has gotten stuck on that scenario before. 

In November 2019, the company started notifying owners of accounts judged inactive—its policy has been that six months without a login(Opens in a new window) counted as such—that they had to log in by Dec. 11 or have those accounts reclaimed. But after Twitter users protested that clawing back the handles of the deceased would amount to a form of digital desecration, Twitter hit pause on that purge. 

That lack-of-use case remains a problem on Twitter. Unlike other social platforms(Opens in a new window), Twitter still doesn’t have any sort of memorialization feature, although it does allow a family member to request the deactivation(Opens in a new window) of the deceased person’s account. 

That leaves the afterlife of a Twitter username up to who gets and retains custody of the account password. That’s resulted in such cases of social-media grave robbery as the brief 2016 takeover(Opens in a new window) of the late, great New York Times media reporter David Carr’s Twitter account by a spambot. 

Now would be a great time for Twitter to come up with a durable solution for this inevitable problem—except that after Musk’s multiple layoff binges, whoever had expertise in that area probably doesn’t work at the company anymore.