Should Twitter Delete the Accounts of Dead People? (siliconvalley.com) 113
An anonymous reader quotes SiliconValley.com:
Twitter said Wednesday it is putting the brakes, for now, on a plan to start deleting inactive accounts that was set to begin next month.
Twitter said it would hold back on the plan to clear out accounts that had been inactive for at least six months after hearing from multiple users about whether or not they would be able to access the accounts of deceased family members after the Dec. 11 deadline Twitter had established.
Twitter had already begun informing users that their accounts and usernames were in danger of being deleted if they didn't log in at least once by Dec. 11. However, less than 24 hours after announcing the new policy, Twitter took to Twitter to say it had changed its plans. "We've heard from you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased," Twitter said. "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."
Twitter had originally said they were worried that inactive users couldn't agree to the recently-updated terms of service. And they've also said the move would help them "present more accurate, credible information people can trust across Twitter."
This raises some interesting metaphysical questions. Would you want your Twitter accounts to live on forever, even after your death? And should Twitter be allowed to choose a default answer for everyone? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Should Twitter delete the accounts of dead people?
Twitter said it would hold back on the plan to clear out accounts that had been inactive for at least six months after hearing from multiple users about whether or not they would be able to access the accounts of deceased family members after the Dec. 11 deadline Twitter had established.
Twitter had already begun informing users that their accounts and usernames were in danger of being deleted if they didn't log in at least once by Dec. 11. However, less than 24 hours after announcing the new policy, Twitter took to Twitter to say it had changed its plans. "We've heard from you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased," Twitter said. "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."
Twitter had originally said they were worried that inactive users couldn't agree to the recently-updated terms of service. And they've also said the move would help them "present more accurate, credible information people can trust across Twitter."
This raises some interesting metaphysical questions. Would you want your Twitter accounts to live on forever, even after your death? And should Twitter be allowed to choose a default answer for everyone? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Should Twitter delete the accounts of dead people?
Who cares? (Score:1)
do they own the accounts? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the accounts should be inherited.
Unless the deceased gave some instructions to burn all his stuff and correspondences in their will.
there's a LOT of old letters and such that are technically private that historians are using for research. Usually the people who wrote or received them have not consented to some eula giving the researchers access to them.
Perhaps twitter should worry more about changing the rules and lawmakers should worry more about companies having the power to change an eula and cease to provide service with the old eula - especially when the eulas move ownership of digital data.
What if Amazon just decided to update their eula into saying that "hey, if you cease to use your amazon account and to pay us then we will put all your data in the leased servers publicly on the internet" defaulting all zombie accounts into public as a way to extort people into paying them again for access to them to delete the data.
Also - this inheritance of the accounts should apply to digital goods like appstores, game accounts and such. It's rather anti consumer that a music library worth thousands of dollars would somehow cease to exist if the person who paid for them ceases to exist. The companies should either let the legal inheritors get the access or move them to a different account OR the companies should be forced to not "sell" anything and instead label everything very, very clearly as lifetime rentals.
GDPR rights should move to the inheritors as well - giving them the officially recognized ability to request all the data from the accounts and removal of data if they want.
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We have archive.org for all of the deceased's history.
The inheritance for a name really isn't legal in many ways, although not outright illegal. Misrepresentation in especially social media can be onerous where anonymity isn't an option.
Lots of us are dismayed when we see old friends arise from the dead to be some social tag or another. IMHO, let the dead rest in peace.
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If by "name" you mean username on a platform, then afaik you never own it in the first place. Copyright on the other hand is inherited and should cover anything published on social media.
the name isn't the point. (Score:3)
it's not the name that is the main value in long term, but the point is the correspondances and access and preservation of those.
it can be kind of important for verifying what kind of promises, contracts and such the deceased made too, but long term it's the equivalent of inherting a big bunch of letters from an attic. those have been used for history preservation many times in the past. archive.org is more akin to preserving whatever the deceased published on local newspapers classified and opinions sectio
Broader historical record? Or piles of tripe? (Score:2)
I'd probably give you a positive mod point if I ever had one to give.
However I think that much of Twitter should be preserved as part of the historical record of our times. Not just #PresidentTweety's own electronic brain farts, but the interactions with his brain farts should be part of history. If there is any.
Another angle is that that such policies may delete the indirect sources of history. Yeah, I know Trump is the easy target again, but I'm sure he retweets from dead people and fake people and whatev
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"I think the accounts should be inherited."
If the deceased had wanted that, he would have given you the password in his will.
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Why would I care whether someone cares that I'm gone? By then I'm gone. If they want to care about me, they should probably do it now, anyone who only wants to care that I'm gone but doesn't give a shit about me while I'm alive can as well go to hell.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Who cares if they're dead? It's fucking twitter. They should delete the accounts of live people as a solid starting point.
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I'm not trolling,
Sometimes I wonder if my kids wont find me with my pants down,
I wonder if they will find me in either my best or my worst moment
I wonder if this isn't a question that should or shouldn't be asked....
Who cares if I'm dead? Another great question...
What if my ex-wife cares if and how I died?
On that note, I leave my children the following, if they find "this" account...
up up down down left right left right b a select start
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Why did you add the superfluous "select" bit in there?
Some people have friends to play with.
Re: Who cares? (Score:1)
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We'd be seeing their actual user base (Score:2)
if they deleted all the inactive accounts. I think it'd be interesting. Plus I can finally get rid of my account, which has also been inactive for over 6 months.
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This would be the best of both worlds. Actual user base would be obvious, but no data is lost
In any case, Twitter hardly has an obligation to keep information forever, so it wo
Re:We'd be seeing their actual user base (Score:4, Funny)
Immortalizing people by keeping their account live seems like a nice idea.
But... how can dead people agree to the updated terms of service?
No (Score:3)
They should forever pay for their social sins
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Yep. In 100 years most of the accounts will be for dead people and we'll all see just how sad Twitter was.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Haven’t the dead been through enough? Now they must suffer the additional indignity of having their Twitter accounts deleted too?
I quite agree. The people I feel the most sorry for are those who died before Twitter was a thing. Imagine their poor souls floating around in limbo unable to read Donald Trump's tweets.
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Haven’t the dead been through enough? Now they must suffer the additional indignity of having their Twitter accounts deleted too?
For some reason this made me think of this line in Alastair Reynolds' [wikipedia.org] novel, Revelation Space [wikipedia.org]
The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.
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additional indignity
If you're suffering idignity of anything that happens to your Twitter account after you die you're doing it wrong. Very very wrong.
We Need to a Future Shame Them (Score:2)
Yes (Score:1)
IMO (Score:2)
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On the other hand, Twitter is a commercial operation and the now deceased users had friends that might rage quit if the accounts of the dead just go poof.
Our society calls for some minimum level of respect for people who have lost loved ones. Some such respectful things are enshrined in law, some are social custom that others will think poorly of you if you should violate them. Even though ever larger portions of society act as if they were raised by wolves (who BTW also demonstrate respect for their dead a
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Twatter can ask for donations to keep the dead twatters alive. If no one pays, move to /dev/nul
why delete instead of disable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why delete instead of disable? (Score:4)
The short answer is so that they can free up the usernames so other people can use them.
There are a lot of inactive accounts that are sort of "Twitter name squatting" on desirable usernames, and Twitter would like to have some way to free them up. That's why you end up with users with names like @RealCelebrityName instead of just @CelebrityName: because someone is "squatting" on their name. (Or actually has their name, but then stopped using Twitter.) I also remember some company has @CompanyName_ because @CompanyName was taken by a dead account. (But not which company, I just remember thinking "that's clearly a fake account" but it turned out not to be.)
Presumably whenever Twitter figures out how they want to deal with accounts controlled by dead people, it's either going to involve freeing up their username anyway or deleting "inactive" accounts versus accounts where the owner had died.
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The accounts could be renamed (applies also to tweets and references) and marked somehow.
I find it problematic already, that tweets can be deleted from a conservation robbing the answering tweets their context.
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How do you solve this problem?
Really? C'mon. I can think of 2 solutions of the top.
1. By using username and password as the unique key. Is there a million users with your user name? Great. Progressively increase entropy required for a password on any taken user name. This way there is no chance of collision. The difficult part is how to prune name squatting accounts. But this shouldn't be a more difficult problem than figuring out which accounts belong to dead people.
2. Attach 3-4 digit alphanumeric pins to user names. Let users
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This. Disable, yes. Delete, no.
That said, what is Twitter's EULA on this matter? Do Twitter users own their own posts (per copyright law?) Or does Twitter own them? If it's the former, then the user's heirs inherit the tweets. I presume they can't stop Twitter from continuing to make them available, but neither can Twitter claim ownership of them, or use them in a way that violates copyright law (such as modifying them without attribution, until copyright lapses.) But if it's the latter, then for the love o
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Are you paying for the storage? Then your opinion is worth less than a drop of water to a dead Twitter user.
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> textx to live on, they should host them themselves and lpay for it themselves. Tgat goes also for me.
> Or you can orint them out
Taht textt dos not need to life onn.
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How about giving people the option? Google has a feature where if you don't use your account at all for 3 months it auto-deletes itself. That included social media posts back when they had a social media platform.
It's opt-in and they send you regular reminders that it is set up, so it's a very clear statement of intent from the user. A kind of digital will if you like.
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I'm sure you have a library full of books of old writings from your ancestors? No? Only select ones, if that?
History gets lost, if someone were interested, they would archive it. There is no real 'information' there, unless the deceased had some form of major impact, in which case their biographer would probably have the interesting bits already.
You could basically delete all tweets that had no 'socially interesting information' (eg. filter by retweets and likes)
Digital tomb stone. (Score:1)
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Obviously there should be a choice.
I agree there should be an option to delete. It is quite sad to seeing some of the hundreds of followers, who don't know someone. respond to "it's XXX's birthday today", with "happy birthday, hope you are well".
Keep Twitters History Real! (Score:2)
All of these people took time out of their lives sending tweets. This increased Twitter's participation numbers. Twitter used this to market their product and grow. In America it comes down to, Is your president more important than my dead uncle? Not according to the law. We owe it to history to keep these few kilobytes of data.
If Twitter is about the public discourse and keeping a record of what is true, it is imperative to keep the regular folks tweets.
--
Yes, I deserve a spring – I owe nobo
Archive and give access (Score:2)
I think when someone passes on, Twitter should archive the whole account somewhere and give access to the public posts to anyone who asks - but free the actual username for someone else to use. No way should someone be able to keep a Twitter handle long after they are dead or just abandon the platform.
I don't want my tweets remembered (Score:1)
Jesus Christ (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Keep them up (Score:1)
For the full duration of the copyright
No. It's creepy (Score:2)
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Re: No. It's creepy (Score:2)
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Hey, whatever works for you, really. I'm glad it does. My niece has a page her mother memorialized, too. Every birthday and some other days people post miss you and such. It really does creep me out. As I said though ymmv.
Man, you must think the Mexicans are creepy [wikipedia.org].
Re: No. It's creepy (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Delete mine please! (Score:2)
When I die, I would prefer all of my accounts go with me. I wouldn’t go so far as to try to wipe my presence from the internet. However my accounts should be deactivated and deleted if I have anything to say about it.
Twitter is a for-profit company ... (Score:2)
... and should be allowed to conduct business as it sees fit.
One problem I see is that survivors would have to out themselves to claim the accounts so they could archive them.
Nothing I've read in the ToS says that Twitter is a cemetery.
Prediction from 2014 (Score:2)
By 2024, of the 41% decedent profiles, 22% provide click-farm jobs for 90.3 million children in developing economies, though any reliable approximation is known only to FaceBook's legal department and a closely guarded trade secret.
Their account (Score:1)
Make a will?
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Corollary : somewhere there is a niche for IT people to act as advisors to the executors of people's will. Having been recently asked to sign on the dotted line as an executor of my parents' wills, I'd have to ask myself if I seriously know what I'm doing with this stuff. Some things - like archiving local natural history data into a museum - I understand fairy well, but this social media shit I ditched a few years ago and cleared out my FarceBook account, but keep it alive to prevent cyber-squa
Yes, they should (Score:4, Interesting)
As a practical matter, a service should be able to remove inactive accounts to reduce the resource drain (mainly storage space and related costs). You understand when you sign up that you're hosting your content on someone else's service, and that it isn't guaranteed space there forever (especially for a free service). Your heirs... well, they weren't involved in that agreement, they don't get a say in that matter.
In practice I think Twitter should let users pick whether they want their content preserved after they die or not. Either way it'll still be subject to being cleaned up, but accounts whose owners wanted them preserved should be on a longer time-frame. Twitter should also allow an option for heirs of account owners to show their legal status and take control of the account of the deceased, at which point they can keep the account active and control whether it gets purged or not directly. A secure method of delegating control if the owner isn't able to exercise it themselves would also be nice, eg. emergency 2-factor recovery codes that can be left in a sealed envelope along with the password (some services have emergency 2-factor code lists, some don't, and 2-factor complicates handing off control of an account).
For services where the owner's paying for it, the rule should be that the account continues as long as the bills are paid and the service itself exists. The same options for delegating control or passing it to heirs should be there, but clean-up should never happen to accounts which are paid through the current billing cycle no matter how active or inactive they are. Paying the bills is up to the heirs, and informing the heirs is up to the account owner.
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Why would an inactive account cause a resource drain if the service was coded correctly?
One service I visit issued a notice that they were going to delete all notifications older than 6 months. I proposed their policy should be to delete notifications older than 1 year if the account has more than 500 notifications. It'll probably end up freeing just as much space, but... not be as punishing for those of us who keep our accounts well trimmed.
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Obviously. My point is that too many people think the nuclear option is the only solution. That's just laziness and the inability to track down inefficiency.
Of course, it's also common policy to simply flag content to be hidden, and nothing actually ever gets deleted. It'd be kind of sad to waste so much space keeping "deleted" posts on active accounts, yet wipe out accounts that haven't been active for months. If saving resources is the goal, that doesn't sound like a terribly effective policy. It's u
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Twitter should offer an auto-delete service for old tweets. There are third party ones but a native solution would be nice so you don't have to give apps or websites access to your account.
I auto-delete tweets after 1 year. The conversation is long over, no need to leave material around for quote mining when I run for office in a decade or two.
The real question (Score:3)
Remove them, with empathy (Score:3)
This allows next of kin to put a message up, but closes the account so that nobody else can misrepresent themselves as the deceased.
And it takes a liability off Twitter's hands as well.
Nothing in this universe lasts forever--and dead accounts are still susceptible to live hackers.
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The problem is determining when someone is dead.
You don't want to make it too easy for their relatives to report it or it will be weaponized to delete living people's accounts*. To make matters worse every country has a different way of handling death, a different kind of certificate written in a language that most Twitter staff can't read.
* In fact there was a Black Hat talk talk about this a few years ago. Apparently it's not that hard to set yourself up as a registered coroner and create fake death certi
What does inactive mean? All of the above! (Score:2)
There are multiple ways in which an account can be "inactive":
* The person behind it has not posted for a time period
* Nobody has read the user's old tweets for a long time
* The person behind it has not been logged in for a time period
I think that first when an account has been inactive in all these ways for a period, should it be a candidate for deletion.
Then, the user should be notified by email that it risks deletion. And if there has still not been any activity for a while, then it should be deleted.
This is a big concern with all digital data (Score:1)
They should certainly revise the suspension policy (Score:3)
I use bad language in my tweets and sometimes I'm quite, abrasive but I do my best to not attack or insult anyone directly. I make tweets mostly about the poor government policy of my country, ever focused on investing house prices through any means necessary.
But I digress, I don't attack people, yet I'm suspended at the moment for the first time ever. No email, no text, no DM. Nothing. No idea what for, simply logged on and found I couldn't do stuff.
. Requested it to be looked at 2 days ago, nothing. I guess that they don't work weekends?
Poor all round.
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That's very odd, normally the reason is given even for bot accounts. Do you use the Twitter web site or app, or a third party one?
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I use the web page on mobile and desktop.
I got a response, I have a picture of my favourite obese dog on my profile page (you heard me)
Apparently that's hate content, perm ban, no warning.
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That doesn't sound right. For a start if you get banned for content it says you got banned for ToS violations.
No idea why your dog would be an issue, there is far worse stuff up there. Also if it's the first time you get a time-out and have to change your banner to something else before they will let you unlock your account.
Are you sure you are on the real Twitter and it's not that you have been phished and your account stolen? Can you give us a link to the account so we can take a look? This one? https://t [twitter.com]
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Yes that's the account, here's the quote.
Hello,
Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating Twitter's Terms of Service (https://twitter.com/tos), specifically the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules) against using hateful or sensitive content in your profile.
To ensure that people feel safe on our platform, we prohibit using hateful or sensitive content in your profile or header image, account name, username, bio, location, or website. Learn more about ou
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My guess is that you were targeted by someone mass reporting your account.
Unfortunately because Twitter doesn't care about just wants to reduce the workload and instances of PTSD among staff it's system for handling these kinds of mistakes is inadequate.
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Hang on maybe it's not the fat dog.
Friend just asked if I burnt in a verified tick in my photo. I did, 7 years ago and they added a circle which cropped out the tick, 5 years ago...
http://chattypics.com/viewer.p... [chattypics.com]
I've just left it like that since, been meaning to fix it (!)
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Ah! That would probably do it then. Still shitty that you can't appeal though, I mean it's a genuine mistake and a relatively minor one too.
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Just to be clear I'm not saying you are wrong here, your account may have been banned, but there is more to it than this. Maybe you were targeted with a load of complaints, that can do it. Unfortunately recovering from that can be impossible because Twitter isn't interested in your appeals.
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I mean someone did at least review the ban enough to specify a reason down to the profile, so a human has looked to some extent.
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Yep. And humans make mistakes, which is why it's so bad that you can't appeal it.
no (Score:2)
Memorial Accounts are the way to go (Score:1)
Simply put, you don't want to lose the posts that a person made, because these posts and replies provide context in other people's postings and threads. Never mind being a memory of a person's thoughts and beliefs. And maybe for some people there would be a useful historical purpose to retaining the posts.
So move the data to a memorial account - no new posting rights, just a read-only archive of the account.
I guess they also want to free up the account names for re-use, so they need to decide on an account
Depends (Score:2)
If they continue tweeting, sure!
Also lots of living need canceling.
I see dead people (Score:1)
Twitter itself will be dead soon enough (Score:1)
The popularity of social media sites is partly driven by fashion - i.e. which of them is "cool". Twitter will have its day, and then likely die a quiet death.
What about legal obligations? (Score:3)
The public proclamations of POTUS are required to be archived and available to the public, ad infinitum. They cannot, legally, be deleted, either, or have access restricted.
Given the current US Presidents proclivity to run off at the fingers off on Twitter, what sort of legal obligation does that imply for the company?
What about previous presidents? (Was Obama the first to use Twitter, or was Bush The Younger the first?)
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The public proclamations of POTUS are required to be archived and available to the public, ad infinitum. .....
and currently ad nauseam
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That sounds like a legal obligation upon the president, and not a private company.
If the president were to grab a turd and scrawl "USA #1" in giant lettering on the side of your home, would you be legally obligated to keep it there? Maybe even touch it up again every time it rains?
Forget (Score:1)
Let me die. GDPR
Why twitter (Score:1)
All accounts on any webpage should have an expiration for termination if not checked in on. Especially the Facebook API login crap who keep scraping information when you only logged in once.
No. Twitter should make occasional posts from (Score:1)
No. (Score:1)
Same as any other item passed on in will (Score:1)
Yes! (Score:2)
Accounts are personal. If a person dies, the owner is gone. No way those companies could cope with succession paperworks and possible heir trials...
Eventually, with consideration (Score:3)
I don't think they should have to maintain anything indefinitely if they're not getting paid to, but a bit of empathy goes a long way.
Twitter is up to no good (Score:2)
Twitter is planning something offensive or creepy. See here:
> Twitter had originally said they were worried that inactive users couldn't agree to the recently-updated terms of service.
At first this seems absurd - they have no fear of an /inactive/ user acting against the ToS, because, well, they're *inactive*.
So, then, on to the first derivative : Twitter wants to do something with those people's posts that *would not have been permitted* under their old ToS. And whatever it is, it's not something that