Just yesterday, Twitter had reported that they will be removing inactive accounts from its site for users who haven’t logged in more than 6 months. But after receiving a ton of feedback from the user base in regards to user accounts of those who are dead, Twitter has decided to pause the inactive account removal process.
At the moment, Twitter has no method of memorialising an account after a user died. Facebook is known to have had this feature for a long time now. This basically allowed the user account to be continued as a memory account, managed by a close relative or friend of the user. Twitter never had this feature.
When Twitter announced that they will be purging accounts that have not been signed into for more than 6 months, there was a lot of backlash from the community in regards as to what would happen to the accounts of their deceased loved ones.
This impacts accounts in the EU only, for now. We’ve always had an inactive account policy but we haven’t enforced it consistently. We’re starting with the EU in part due to local privacy regulations (eg, GDPR).
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 27, 2019
Today, in a series of tweets Twitter announced that they will pause the deletion of old accounts and clarified a few more thing in the following tweets. They said that they will pause it until they think of a way to memorialise user accounts. Further more they clarified that this inactive account policy always existed but just never enforced it and that these policies are placed to be in compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR in the EU.