How to safely delete your Twitter account

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Will Young

As Twitter’s staff shrinks by the thousands and major companies pause their advertising in response to Elon Musk’s volatile leadership, many users have considered jumping ship, too.

Assuming you’re thinking about separating from Twitter, you have a few decent ways of doing that. Ranked from easiest to reverse/least destructive to hardest to reverse/most destructive, here are our four favorite.

1. Leave your account as is: frozen in time, like you just disappeared.
2. Change your account to private to stop people who haven’t followed you from seeing what you’ve tweeted.
3. Completely delete your account permanently.

Choice 1: Walk Away
This is a simple one: Simply cease tweeting.

Your Twitter history will be accessible to you and others as long as you keep your account open and visible to the public and Twitter continues to operate. You can continue where you left off if you change your mind.

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Choice 2:Privacy Preferred
People who don’t follow you can’t see what you tweet if you make your Twitter account private. This is known as “protecting your tweets” on Twitter. Before they can view your tweets, new followers must request permission, but existing followers can view and interact with your entire timeline.
Why is your account locked? As Musk promises to loosen up on content moderation and Twitter’s engineering ranks dwindle, it is a precaution in case you are concerned about an increase in hostile or abusive content on Twitter or just a flood of new bots and fake accounts.
You can go private in the “privacy and safety part of your Twitter settings. It can be reversed: It only takes one more click to make your account public again.

3rd Choice: Delete Your Account Forever
Deleting your Twitter account is simple, but it won’t immediately take effect. You must first “deactivate” your Twitter account, which can be done from the settings page.

You will select a “reactivation period” there: 12 months or 30 days. This is your window of regret. Twitter will not delete your account if you change your mind and log back in within this timeframe. (By deactivating your account, you can always begin the process again.)

In any case, on the off chance that you don’t log back in during the reactivation time frame, your record will be erased when it’s up.

There is one valid justification not to erase your account, though, regardless of whether you are truly never going t sign into Twitter in the future: When you delete your account, you free up your handle, which is your username that starts with an @. Any tweets in the past that mentioned your handle will now point to the account of the new person if they claim it. It may reflect poorly on you if the newcomer is a problematic poster or impersonator.

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