Twitter Will Delete Accounts on December 11 That Have Not Been Logged Into Within Six Months ⇥ bbc.com

Dave Lee, BBC News:

Twitter will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for more than six months, unless they log in before an 11 December deadline.

The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died — unless someone with that person’s account details is able to log-in.

It is the first time Twitter has removed inactive accounts on such a large scale.

The site said it was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies.

My timeline has been humming today with people excited to claim usernames that will likely be freed up, but it seems as though Twitter has — as ever — failed to fully think through their plans. I imagine there are plenty of people out there who occasionally check in on the Twitter accounts of deceased friends and family; Twitter simply has no solution to preserve those memories.

Jason Scott of the Internet Archive has organized a process to keep a copy of the tweets of dead users.

Update: Twitter has announced that this was only supposed to affect E.U. users, and that they will not begin purging accounts until they figure out memorialization for deceased users’ accounts.