As technology advances, we’re having to answer questions that we didn’t originally anticipate. One of those questions is what do we do with people’s social media accounts after they die?
Twitter announced that they wanted to delete all of their inactive accounts by December 11, so if you hadn’t posted in the last 6 months, the account would be wiped. Immediately, people were up in arms because Twitter seemed to have completely forgotten about the fact that people’s accounts don’t disappear when they die.
Tweets are thoughts, feelings, and little tidbits from real people, and since the announcement, a lot of people have been talking about how they go back and look at loved ones Twitter profiles to laugh and remember them.
Because of this small oversight about our own mortality, Twitter have temporarily walked back on their plan to delete all of the accounts until they work out how to memorialise accounts.
You might have seen the memorialise function that Facebook already have. It’s a setting which freezes accounts as they were so that friends and family can look back at people’s pages and stops anybody else from logging in.
The reason Twitter gave for deleting the accounts is because inactive accounts aren’t able to agree to their new privacy policies, and by getting rid of them people with a ton of inactive accounts won’t seem quite as impressive to new followers.
They still want to go through with deleting inactive accounts, admitting that it was a “miss” on their part for not realising the mistake sooner. There’s no work on when they’ll actually get around to creating this feature though, a spokesperson has said that they have “no further details to share at this time.”
I’m sure nobody thought about what to do with dead people’s accounts when they were sitting in Silicon Valley programming the most recent Twitter update, but social media is well and truly a part of our lives. It’s probably no real surprise that our accounts are also a part of our death.