A day after confirming plans to repossess inactive accounts, Twitter announced it will delay the process out of respect for the dead.
The microblogging service has already begun emailing dormant accounts that have not been signed into for more than six months.
“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,” a spokesperson said this week.
But the Dec. 11 deadline to log in (before idle accounts are removed and thrown into a grab bag of names for Hunger Games-style selection) appears to have been suspended.
“We’ve heard your feedback about our effort to delete inactive accounts and want to respond and clarify,” Twitter Support said on Wednesday.
“This impacts accounts in the EU only, for now,” according to the company.
Well, that’s news to me.
Twitter has “always had an inactive account policy,” but hasn’t enforced it “consistently,” the support team explained. Now it’s cracking down—starting with the EU, where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) recently went into effect.
But the process has implications beyond abandoned users: For instance, what will happen to the tweets of the dearly departed?
Unless they left a password in their will, most expired users won’t be logging in any time soon. Which means, under Twitter’s new policy, their tweets will be deleted and their username bestowed upon someone else.
“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 Support admitted. “We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorialize accounts.”
There is no word yet on how the company plans to accomplish that.
“We apologize for the confusion and concerns we caused and will keep you posted,” it said.
More on Geek.com:
- Facebook Adds Tributes Tab to Memorialized Accounts
- The Dead Will One Day Outweigh the Living on Facebook
- Twitter Rolls Out ‘Hide Replies’ Feature Globally
