Here’s how to avoid losing your Twitter handle to Elon Musk’s purge of inactive accounts

Musk launched his bid for Twitter to promote free speech and then took a u-turn in the name of tackling bots or fake handles. He started off by slashing the Twitter workforce by 50 per cent, while 90 per cent of its employees were left jobless in India. The next group on the chief twit’s list of targets for removal are accounts which haven’t been used, or handles that haven’t been tweeting for years.

A massive decongestion drive?

Elon Musk has announced that more than 150 crore accounts will be cleared out from Twitter, as part of his push to make usernames available for others. The new boss who has fired people based on their opinions about his policies expressed on Twitter, is now keen to remove users who have been silent on the site for too long. Musk has previously said that accounts inactive for 15 years need to go, but currently there’s no clarity on how long they should be dormant to be deleted. In October, the new Twitter chief also mentioned that those who haven’t used their accounts in a year, might also face deletion, as the site focuses on monetisable active users.

So here are a few things you need to look at in order to avoid losing your handle in Musk’s latest purge.

Make sure you’ve been actively tweeting for a while and are receiving ads, so that you are counted among around 23.77 crore monetisable users.

Accounts which haven’t been logged in for a year might also be deleted, so if you plan to get back on the platform in future, now is the time to increase your presence.

You can track your clout

Apart from the deletion of handles based on how much people are tweeting, Twitter is also going to show people how much views their tweets are garnering. This comes at a time when people are unclear about their reach on the social media site.

Published on: Friday, December 09, 2022, 09:03 PM IST