If you’re thinking of deleting your Twitter, I wouldn’t blame you (I’d only ask what took you so long). Things are wild over there right now, and stability sure isn’t on the horizon. However, before you take the nuclear option and say goodbye to Elon Musk and his ilk, consider not deleting your account: Don’t stay, mind you—just leave in a safer way.
Why deleting your Twitter is dangerous
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When you initiation the deactivation process for your Twitter account, it takes 30 days before your account is permanently deleted, tweets and all. However, once that 30 days is up, your username is fair game. After all, you deleted your account, and, therefore, relinquished your claim over the name. It now returns to the “people,” or at least the first person to notice its availability, where it can be used in a new account for as long as that user wants it.
This is the nature of the internet: Abandon a username, and someone else will snatch it up. But it isn’t something to be taken likely. Sure, it doesn’t matter if some nobody wants to take over your novelty account “MarvelRocksDCSucks2012,” since your days of fighting about comic book movies on the internet are behind you. But if your Twitter handle is your real name, the potential for problems escalates.
Obviously, this issue is most pressing for those with public personas. If you delete your Twitter, and someone takes over your handle, they can tweet as if they were you. Worse yet, once Twitter Blue comes back, they have the potential to “verify” themselves with a blue check. To the average Twitter user, the tweets from this account would look like they were coming from you, no matter what the new owner of the account was tweeting. “DC is cinema” could be attached to your brand.
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But you don’t need to be a celebrity or high profile person to worry about this potential impersonation. For better or worse, our identities are tied to social media these days. When your name is searched online, people will find that Twitter account and anything they might have tweeted under your “name.”
While that’s bad enough, it can impact important opportunities in your life. Everyone from college admissions to job recruiters scours the internet for your digital footprint to evaluate whether or not you’re a good fit for whatever it is you’re applying for. They’re not going to take the time to investigate whether that Twitter account is yours or not: They’re going to associate those tweets with you.
Even if the worse case scenario doesn’t happen, you don’t want someone out there able to use your likeness against you, especially when that username actually belonged to you in the past. As highlighted in this tweet by Adrienne Travis, the best course of action, then, is to abandon your account without deleting it altogether.
How to safely leave Twitter
The first step is to delete all your tweets. This would happen automatically 30 days after hitting Twitter’s official “deactivate” button anyway, so it’s no different to do it yourself. You could go through and delete your tweets one-by-one, but depending on how long you’ve had your account and how active you’ve been, that could take way too long. Instead, use a tweet deleter service like the appropriately named Tweet Deleter. You can sign in with your Twitter credentials, and the service will wipe your account clean. It even deletes likes!
Tweet Deleter will save your deleted tweets in its app, but you can also download an archive of your account through Twitter itself if you’d like.
Once your tweets (and likes) are dealt with, it’s time to close up shop. Start by heading to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Audience and tagging, then choose “Protect your tweets.” If you do have any public information left attached to your account, such as likes, privatizing the account will prevent non-followers from seeing.
Next, go to your profile, then “Edit profile,” to delete any personal information in your bio, and replace your profile picture with, well, anything else. Finally, change your password to something impossible to guess. It’s the digital version of locking your door and throwing away the key.