The inactive accounts on Twitter will be short-lived: the CEO Elon Musk announced a “purge” of the social network, starting to delete them. Anyone who doesn’t connect in the next few days will lose their account on the platform.
Inactive accounts on Twitter, Musk starts deleting them
In his last tweetthe CEO of Twitter Elon Musk warned that Twitter would delete accounts that haven’t logged in for a long timethus influencing the number of followers. “We’re removing accounts that haven’t shown any activity for years, so you may see a decrease in followers,” Musk wrote.
Under Twitter’s new rules, a user is considered inactive if not log in “at least once every 30 days”. An older version of these rules, filed on April 19, required you to log in at least every six months to keep an account active. Twitter has been changing the rules without making much noise in recent weeks.
The Twitter alert follows Musk’s threat to take over NPR’s Twitter account if he stops tweeting. The threat came after the newspaper had announced that he was leaving Twitter.
In response to pressure from Musk to get NPR back on Twitter, NPR reporter Bobby Allyn noted that Twitter should be against his inactive account rule if he gave the NPR account to someone else. Allyn explained that NPR would only be subject to the rule if he didn’t log on, not for not tweeting, as Musk had suggested was a violation.
“Musk did not respond when asked if he would like to change the platform’s definition of inactivity,” Allyn said. Many Twitter users are still confused about what the most recent change to the inactive account rule means. At the moment, in fact, usernames long occupied by inactive accounts cannot be reclaimed. But given the speed with which Musk changes the rules, perhaps it could happen soon.