Twitter to Purge Inactive Accounts, ‘Free Up Abandoned Handles’

Twitter is set to start purging accounts that have been inactive for several years, according to Elon Musk.

In a tweet(Opens in a new window) yesterday, Musk said, “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.” No further detail was provided as to when the purge will start and what exactly counts as “several” years of inactivity.

Twitter’s current inactive account policy states(Opens in a new window) that users should log in at least every 30 days to keep their account active. If they don’t, and after a currently undetermined period of time, “accounts may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity.”

The announcement has been met with some push back due to the content that would be lost if such a purge was to be carried out. John Carmack, well-known programmer and co-founder of id Software, urged Musk to reconsider(Opens in a new window), explaining “deleting the output of inactive accounts would be terrible. I still see people liking ten year old tweets I made, but the threads are already often fragmented with deleted or unavailable tweets. Don’t make it worse!”

Carmack also pointed out(Opens in a new window) that “tossing old names back into the free pool just starts another land grab. People camping on hundreds of freely claimed usernames has always been one of the scummier aspects of the internet.” Musk responded(Opens in a new window) by stating, “The accounts will be archived,” but also made it clear(Opens in a new window) that, ” it is important to free up abandoned handles.”

Twitter now needs to produce a set of rules that determine when an inactive account will face deletion. Whatever those rules are, we could see many inactive accounts suddenly become active again simply to stop the content disappearing.

This isn’t the first time Musk has attempted to reclaim unused accounts. Back in December last year, Musk tweeted that Twitter was going to free up the name space of 1.5 billion accounts. Before that in 2019, Twitter attempted a purge but ultimately ended up pausing it following user protests.

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