Twitter Implored To Memorialize Dead People’s Dormant Accounts

People are pushing back against Twitter's purge of inactive accounts.

Grieving families have recently come forward to implore the company behind the social media platform to memorialize the accounts of their dearly departed.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk previously advised people that Twitter would purge accounts that hadn't been touched or used for several years, leading them to become inactive.

Twitter Memorialization Request Details

Many of us may have lost loved ones sometime in our lives, ranging from friends, lovers, and family members. While they may have departed from this world, many of them could still be remembered through the social media accounts they left behind, such as Twitter accounts.

Unfortunately, Musk's announcement of purging inactive Twitter accounts caught grieving families by surprise, with many of them imploring the company to come up with a way to memorialize their dearly departed's accounts to remember them by and help them get through the grieving process.

One of them is Esther Hadded, whose 26-year-old daughter died six years ago. She told Business Insider that Twitter could have sent a warning about the purge, at least, and not just removed them without sending even a notice.

You may recall that Twitter no longer has a communications team following the consecutive round of layoffs the company went through to downsize its workforce in the name of a positive cash flow.

Haddad said that it crushed her to know that Twitter deleted her daughter's Twitter account without any warning and that she lost one of the ways she had to cope with her loss.

"When you lose someone, the tiniest memory is comforting, the tiniest," Haddad said.

Another Twitter user, Emily Reid, said that Twitter's purging of inactive accounts says a lot about Musk's "lack of empathy and tendency towards doing things without noticing or caring about the consequences."

Reed had a sister who died ten years ago but found a way to remain close to her personality and zest for life by visiting and reading her Twitter timeline.

"F*** you @elonmusk, your nonsense has taken away a monument to my sister's mark on this earth," Reed tweeted.

Twitter has yet to respond to any inquiries regarding people's reactions to its purge of inactive accounts.

Twitters Memorialization Problem

Twitter And Facebook are both social media platforms that existed and gained popularity in the late 2000s and the early 2010s. However, while Facebook had a way to memorialize the accounts of our dearly departed, Twitter doesn't, even until now.

What Twitter did in the past, however, was announced to its users that accounts that were inactive for six months would eventually get deleted to free up name space and let new users use their usernames, per Fortune. Twitter made this announcement in 2019 but didn't go through with it when many people pointed out the platform's lack of a memorialization plan for dead people's accounts, per a Twitter Insider tweet.

While Musk did mention that the purged accounts would be "archived," he didn't clarify what he meant by saying that.