Elon Musk announces purge of unused Twitter accounts—but ...

“Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts,” CEO Elon Musk tweeted yester…oh, sorry, that was five months ago. Here’s yesterday’s tweet: “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.” 

Speaking as a David Meyer who has occasionally been annoyed that some namesake set up the @davidmeyer Twitter account in 2011, tweeted “Just created an account” and then disappeared, I can certainly see the value in such a purge (though overall I remain happy with @superglaze, a handle I’ve been using online for nearly three decades now). The question is whether Musk can avoid the very well-signposted pitfalls that are associated with clearing out dormant accounts.

Ye Olde Twitter, which had hinted at such a move as far back as 2010, said definitively in 2019 that it would deactivate all accounts that had not been signed into for six months. It swiftly abandoned that plan after many pointed out that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has no memorialization plan for the accounts of dead people, which surviving relatives often visit for comfort. “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 memorialize accounts,” Twitter tweeted.  And then, crickets, until Musk came along last year. 

The lack of memorialization isn’t Twitter’s only challenge. John Carmack, the metaverse maven who recently fled Meta, responded to Musk’s tweet yesterday by expressing concern that purging inactive accounts would delete historic tweets and fragment old threads. “I agree it’s worth preserving the libraries from the ancient internet!” added the extremely-online musician Grimes, who is Musk’s ex.

“The accounts will be archived,” said Musk. “But it is important to free up abandoned handles.”

Another counterpoint courtesy of Carmack: “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. Maybe require buying at least one month of Twitter Blue if you want to claim an inactive username.” (Would that solve the problem? I’m not so sure.)

There is a point to freeing up abandoned handles, but it will all be in the implementation. This could conceivably go right if the archiving process is cleverly managed. But if it goes wrong—and Musk’s Twitter has an atrocious track record when it comes to executing major policy changes—then a lot of people are going to be left heartbroken that they can no longer scroll through the old tweets of departed loved ones, and/or horrified to see those accounts spring to life under the control of a complete stranger. 

I know that Musk revels in doing the things that everyone says are fraught with danger, but unless he’s cracked the conundrum that stymied his predecessors, this one could mess up something that still gives Twitter a deeper meaning: fond memories.

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David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman. 

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