It may sound excessive, but yes, it has been Elon Musk himself who has advanced the removal of 1.5 billion inactive accounts to free up usernamesone of many measures to refresh Twitter and, in this case, to give the opportunity to those who use the platform and have to adapt to what is left.
Perhaps it sounds excessive due to the number, it should be clarified, and it is that it is estimated that Twitter has some 300 million active users worldwide, a certainly small figure compared to giants like Facebook or TikTok and that does not correspond to the relevance and influence of the little bird’s social network.
Be that as it may, one thing is what you have and another what has been havinghundreds of millions of users who over the years have come and gone, leaving behind usernames that no one else can use, even though no one else is using them, many of them related to organizations or personalities.
Well, that is going to end, although as Elon Musk points out, they are going to do it carefully, notifying the users who have registered these accounts beforehand that if they do not reactivate them -that is, if they do not start using Twitter- they will they will lose. Likewise, they will be deleted only “accounts without tweets created years ago«. At least to start with.
Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
The measure that Elon Musk is now announcing, however, has precedents in the previous administration of Twitter. At the end of 2019, the start of the deletion of inactive accounts was warned, although shortly after, those Twitter users whose activity had a possible academic interest in the future were stopped out of respect for the deceased. And until today.
So we will have to see how the new administration, which is looked at with a magnifying glass at everything it does, mounts it to carry out this initiative. By the way, it is quite a logical policy for a social network like Twitter, focused on outward communication, in which the fastest, and not the fittest, choose their username.
Of course for now no specific date has been given for the application of this measure, as on the other hand happens with almost everything raised by its new owner. But there is the proposal.
