After massive criticism, Twitter has put its plan to delete inactive accounts by 11 December on ice for the time being. The criticism mainly concerned the deletion of accounts of deceased persons.
Twitter had announced that it would delete accounts that had not been used for at least six months on 11 December. The right to delete inactive accounts is enshrined in the terms of use of the Short Message Service, but there is no obligation to delete.
Deletion of inactive accounts is considered by Twitter itself to be a measure to achieve „more accurate and credible information“ on the platform. The extent to which inactive accounts make information inaccurate or untrustworthy was not explained. In practice, deletion would have two main advantages: Firstly, the user database would become considerably leaner; moreover, some attractive user names, which have been registered but not used so far, would become available again.
The announcement of the deletion action raised questions about...
