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Source: John Lamb / Getty

Twitter Is Going After Inactive Accounts To Free Up Unused Handles

Have you ever been pining after a Twitter username and gone to the account that has is, only to realize that person hasn’t even tweeted in 3 years? Well, today’s your lucky day because according to the people over at Twitter, they’re finally doing something about it.

As it stands right now, users can squat on an account for years without logging on, holding onto sought-after handles despite long stretches of inactivity. But now, as spotted by a BBC reporter named Dave Lee, it looks like Twitter is finally getting proactive about the situation–which could mean you can drop the “1234” or extra 5 a’s at the end of your username.

According to Lee, Twitter is “clawing back account that have been inactive for more than six months,” going on to clarify that inactive means that person hasn’t logged on at all in half a year.

According to the reporter, this action from Twitter won’t really have any impact on a lot that goes on within the app, but what it will effect is available usernames. “Come December 11th there could be an almighty landgrab for newly-available accounts,” he explains.

The social media platform has–and always has had–an inactive account policy in place, but it traditionally hasn’t done much to enforce this. In the past, the company has encouraged users to, at the very least, log in and Tweet ever six months–but now, it’s taking the added measure of reaching out to inactive users, prompting them to log in prior to December 11, or risk being deleted on that day.

According to TechCrunch, the timeline of opening up those inactive accounts to other users hasn’t been expanded upon yet. As they point out, in the fine print on the inactive account policy page, it still notes that the service does not “generally accept requests for usernames that seem inactive,” short of perceived trademark infringement.

A spokesperson noted in an email to the publication that these aforementioned accounts “may” become available, though the process of removing old accounts will probably take a number of months.

 

Twitter Is Finally Going To Free Up Handles By Deleting All Those Inactive Accounts  was originally published on globalgrind.com