Musk announces purge of old Twitter accounts: what about the deceased?

Twitter’s owner Elon Musk has announced – typically, on his profile – that the social network is now purging a massive amount of inactive accounts from the platform. However, it’s unclear what now happens to the accounts of the deceased.

With the purge, Musk is actually keeping his own promise given in December 2022 when the billionaire said that 1.5 billion inactive accounts would be removed from Twitter. Accounts that users haven’t logged into or posted from in years will be targeted, he said.

On the surface, the step seems perfectly rational. Billions of bots are roaming around Twitter and distorting discourse that real users are trying to have – even though Musk himself has been making it increasingly difficult.

Yes, if you’re popular on Twitter your follower account is bound to drop, possibly by a lot. But at least you’ll know that these accounts, supposedly interested in what you have to say, are likely authentic.

“We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop,” Musk announced on Monday.

Then again, how many are “several years” exactly? Has the purge already started? If not, when will the eradication be set in motion? As always, Musk is in no rush to provide clarity.

Besides, bots, or rather, masters of the bot armies, take great care to log in at least once every 30 days to avoid breaching Twitter’s “Inactive Account Policy.”

Perhaps most importantly, we don’t know how Twitter will handle accounts for people who have died, especially profiles that are not managed by their estates.

For example, the account of the singer Amy Winehouse who died in 2011 is active and thus safe but the page of Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi journalist assassinated in 2018, is at risk of being removed because the messages stopped the day he was killed in Turkey.

Also, what happens with the account of Donald Trump, the former president of the United States? Musk reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022 but it hasn’t been active since January 2021 when Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol in Washington.

Finally, friends and family members of people who weren’t famous but had a Twitter profile and died also want to be able to scroll through old posts of their loved ones.

Scott Nover, a reporter at QZ, pointed out that many social media sites are “effectively digital graveyards”, and that deleting the accounts of people who have died was “akin to removing a headstone.”

Nover’s guess is that Twitter needs to scrub old profiles to get better metrics for advertisers. The network which Musk has repeatedly called a loss-making business also needs to save cash, and hosting old accounts is costly.