Elon Musk says Twitter will ‘start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts’

Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter has said that the company will start deleting 1.5 billion accounts that have been inactive for years. These accounts have not tweeted and logged in for years, the purging of these accounts will also free up the namespace, he said.

“Twitter will soon start freeing the namespace of 1.5 billion accounts. These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log-in for years,” Musk said in two tweets.

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The decision to delete inactive accounts will benefit some new users who want to use a particular username but cannot since it has already been acquired. In addition, deleting usernames for new users will bring Twitter’s user base number down. However, it will not have any impact on daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs), something every technology company highlights in their quarterly earnings reports.

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Several people raised a concern about what happens to those accounts whose owners are deceased as their accounts are memorials for friends, family, and followers. But there is no clarity on that part yet.

In 2019, Twitter started a drive to purge inactive accounts. At that time, the company said that it would not remove any inactive accounts until there was a new way for people to memorialize accounts of the deceased.

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“We’ve heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part. We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorialize accounts,” the company said.

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Earlier this month, the new CEO said that the microblogging site has many people, “who read Twitter every day, but almost never tweet.” He urged them to add their voice to the public dialogue. Musk also said that those who read tweets outnumber those who reply/retweet/like tweets by over 1000%.