Twitter is working on a way to make it clear that account holder has died

Twitter is working on a way to announce that the owner of an account has passed away. The company has announced that. Now that is not easy to do and the account of a deceased runs the risk of being deleted in the long run.

It is unknown what the feature will look like and when it will become active. Now relatives sometimes put the words ‘in memoriam’ behind accounts to make it clear that the owner has passed away. Relatives can contact Twitter for the removal of accounts of the deceased. In any case, it seems that if relatives have said that an account owner has died, that ensures that the account is not deleted when cleaning inactive accounts.

The company is talking about the feature right now because of an inactive account cleanup that Twitter had announced. In addition, the social network had not thought about what would happen to accounts of the deceased. “That was a miss on our part”, according to the company. The account cleanup will only take place if it is possible until there is a way to indicate that the twitterer has died.

In addition, Twitter says that the cleanup will initially only take place in the EU. Twitter wants to clean up accounts because of the GDPR: under those rules, companies must not keep personal data longer than necessary. Twitter sees accounts as inactive if users have not logged in for six months or more.