If you’re running a fan account that you haven’t looked at since high school, you might want to move quickly. Twitter is in the process of purging accounts on the platform that are inactive in an effort to free up handles.
According to Elon Musk who tweeted yesterday: “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.”
It begs the question of what “several” literally means to Musk. Depending on who you talk to, “several” can mean anything from three to 10. Whether Musk and his team are going to think that hard about it remains to be seen. Maybe there is no hard and fast rule and it’s simply a judgement call.
However, according to Musk, it does mean that “Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts.”
That will at least be useful to marketers, who, if they are quick, can snap up handles that were previously taken up by a user that’s forgotten about it.
But it’s not all happy news. Users were quick to point out that anyone looking to snap up one of these new handles is going to have to compete with scammers and spammers that are likely to use brand or recognized names for the sake of taking money from unsuspecting users.
