A follow-up on their plan to remove inactive accounts from their platform, Twitter has decided to delay the action instead. The postponement came as a result of users bringing up concerns to the company of removing accounts belonging to deceased loved ones, with no way of signing in on their former owner’s behalf in order to prevent it from happening.
As previously reported, Twitter’s plan of purging inactive accounts was in interest to provide users with trustworthy sources of information and to free up usernames for newcomers. The company stated that the removal of inactive accounts will only resume after they’ve created a method to memorialise accounts belonging deceased loved ones that friends and family wish to keep.
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 Support (@TwitterSupport) November 27, 2019
However, Twitter stated that the action will still proceed on the European Union for the time being as to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy regulations. The company also said that it might enforce its inactivity policy to honour rules in other areas, but promised to notify its users first before doing so.
Most of us treasure the memories of passed loved ones, even in a digital form which could be immortalised forever online. Seeing that Facebook had already implemented a memorial feature for its users, we’re relieved to see that Twitter will be following this gesture in the near future. With that said, Twitter have yet to reveal when the memorial feature is expected to be implemented.
(Source: Twitter via Engadget // Top image: Edar @ pixabay.com)
