Twitter postponed plans to delete inactive accounts until it found a way to preserve accounts belonging to people who have died.
“We have heard about the impact on the accounts of people who died. This escapes our attention. We will not delete inactive accounts until we have a new way for people to remember accounts,” Twitter tweeted, as quoted by The Verge, Thursday (28 / 11/2019).
Clarifying all the confusion we caused 👇🏽 https://t.co/NirJTl7QEM
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) November 27, 2019
Previously, Twitter via an email sent to users warned that any account that was inactive for more than six months could be subject to deletion if the customer did not log in until December 11th. Now, the deadline will shift.
Facebook has a way for user accounts to be perpetuated after the account owner dies. Meanwhile, Twitter has not offered such a function, but a Twitter spokesman told The Verge that their team was thinking of ways to do this.
Currently, Twitter promises to start deleting accounts and freeing usernames, until the feature is there.
After the initial announcement, many people felt they would lose access to the accounts of old friends, family members, celebrities and other influential Twitter users who had died.
Although Twitter said the deletion of the accounts is to begin in the European Union – because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – could later also expand to other countries.
“We can expand the enforcement of our inactive policies in the future to comply with other regulations throughout the world and to ensure service integrity,” Twitter said.
“We will communicate with you all if we do. We apologize for the confusion we caused, and will keep you informed,” Twitter added.
