Twitter owner, Elon Musk, said the platform will soon delete a total of 1.5 billion accounts that have become dormant. According to him, this will help to free the space being occupied by those accounts on Twitter.
Musk said most of the accounts may have been deleted by the owners, as there have been no tweets or login activities on them for years.
- “Twitter will soon start freeing the namespace of 1.5 billion accounts. These are obvious account deletions with no tweets and no log-in for years,” Musk Tweeted on Friday.
Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
This is coming amidst plans by Musk to restore all accounts suspended by Twitter before he bought the company. According to data from Whizcase, a total of 13.7 million accounts were suspended by Twitter between 2018 and 2021. Within that period, the highest suspension, 7.8 million, was recorded in 2019.
People’s reactions: Reacting to Elon Musk’s announcement of plans to delete dormant accounts, some Twitter users commended the move, saying that it will now free some names that can be used to register new accounts.
Others, however, queried the billionaire saying he has yet to fulfil his promise of restoring suspended accounts before thinking of deleting inactive accounts.
- Since his takeover of the company in October, Musk had restored many accounts earlier suspended by Twitter for breaking its rules, including that of former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump insists that Twitter will be used to encourage free speech.
- He took this a step further by announcing an amnesty for all suspended accounts after a poll that saw over 70% of the respondents in support of the decision. The amnesty, according to him, comes with a condition that such an account had not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.
I think it’s a great development which other social media should also do