Twitter is walking back on its announced plan to purge from Twitter-verse dormant accounts. It turned out; the move will lead to complications that the social media company said will require addressing first. Chief of the anticipated problems is how to handle accounts of people who have passed on.
The initial solution from Twitter was to delete these accounts, free up the inactive handles and make them available for fresh registrations.
"As part of our commitment to serve the public conversation, we're working to clean up inactive accounts to present more accurate, credible information people can trust across Twitter," said the company on its initial statement on the matter.
Twitter added the planned action was in accordance with the user account policy, which encourages "people to actively log in and use Twitter when they register an account."
It appeared now that the plan had been shelved. The mass removal has been suspended until further notice, or as reported by The Verge, until the company has come up with a specific program that will preserve the accounts of users presumed or confirmed to have died.
"We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorialize accounts," the company said in a quick reversal of its clean-up project that was scheduled to start on December 11.
Twitter admitted too that the announcement was a misstep and failed to anticipate the repercussions, like the possibility of an account ending up on people with criminal intents.
"We've heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part," Twitter said.
The purging would have operated on the notion that inactive accounts could be put to better use that would benefit both users and the microblogging site. As of September 2019, Variety reported that Twitter counts an estimated 145 million actives users worldwide that can be monetized.
The clean-up drive was seen to boost that possibility significantly, but the company is taking a pause to draw a better plan.
One suggestion from users that will preserve accounts of dead people is to use the Facebook model, and per the same report by The Verge, Twitter has plans to look into the proposal and make ways for the system to work on its own platform.
When the alternative plan will be set in motion, no one knows for now. According to Mashable, Twitter "has no further details to share at this time," which goes to say that the mass account deletion earlier announced is now on hold indefinitely.
