Saira
Do you want to do away with all this overwhelming amount of tweets on your news-feed daily? Are you tired of your twitter account and want to get rid of it? Are you confused as to how you can immediately delete twitter account? Do you feel unsure as to what is the difference between deactivation and deleting your twitter account? If that is the case then this article is all you need, to understand how you can deactivate and delete twitter account.
Here are some easy steps through which you can delete Twitter account;
- Firstly you need to sign in to your account through website. This must be remembered that if you are looking to delete your twitter account, you cannot do it on your app, you need to open twitter on a browser first.
- After opening twitter on your browser, whether through phone or laptop, you need to give in your log in ID and password and sign in to your account
- After that click or tap on your twitter avatar at the top right side of the page.
- When you click it, a drop down menu will appear, you should then find the ‘settings’ option and click on it.
- In the ‘settings’, find the ‘deactivate my account’ option and click on it. This option will be found at the bottom of your ‘account’ menu.
- Before confirming your deactivation, read the information that loads up on your screen after clicking the ‘deactivate my account option’. Once you have read it all and decided to proceed with the deactivation, click on the ‘okay fine, deactivate my account’ option.
- You will need to re-enter your account password again as a verification procedure.
After following all these steps your account will be put in the process of deactivation. You should know that twitter does not immediately delete your account, rather what happens is, that after you confirm your deactivation a 30 days’ time period is given in which your data still remains on twitter but no one can access it and people can no longer see your profile. The account permanently gets deleted after the said 30 days. During this time period you can always recover your account if you feel like not deleting your twitter account after all. How do you go about doing that? Well, the answer is fairly simple just open twitter on browser again and log in to your account. Your account will not be deleted then and the process of deletion will stop. Otherwise after thirty days your account is permanently deleted.
What is the difference between deactivation and deletion?
The difference is pretty simple, although some may confuse it as one and the same thing, it is not so. As mentioned above as well, for twitter accounts deletion immediately is not possible, instead deactivation is done. Deactivation is when your account is put on hold, it is not useable or visible to other people and they can’t view your tweets on twitter anymore, but the data still remains saved for a specific number of days online. After thirty days the data is deleted after which the account is retrievable and that is the difference between these two terms.
Information you need to be aware of before deleting your Twitter account
You should know that after the thirty days’ time period expires the process of deletion of your account activity starts taking place and complete deletion of everything can take almost a week. For more information on this you can always read the policy of Twitter here; https://twitter.com/en/privacy
You can always have a separate private arrangement between yourself and the twitter management thorough which you can change the deactivation and deletion time period. Another important thing to remember is that sometimes people who want to change their username or email ID think that to change these things they need to delete their account and create a new one. That is not needed, because twitter gives you the option of changing your account name and email ID, by going in to account settings again. Hence this is not the reason for which you should be deleting your account.
You must know that a specific username cannot be used again in a new account, even if that new account is made by the same person. Now in case you like your username or email ID or both and you want to keep it, so you can use the same on your new twitter account, here is what you can do. You must before deleting and confirming the deactivation of your account, change the name and email ID of the account that you want to delete. After changing it properly by going in the ‘settings’ of your twitter account you can deactivate your account. Therefore you can reuse your old username on your new twitter account. It can happen that you delete your account permanently but someone else uses your username to make a new account and people think it is still you. So be careful about these loopholes when you decide to delete your account.
Another point that is to be noted is that if you ever posted content that is controlled by the search engines of google and Bing, that content is not under control of twitter and cannot be deleted. Moreover please note that after you deactivate your account, within a few minutes most of your content will not be viewable, nevertheless some of the content can still remain visible and should be removed within a few days.
Step by step guide to making your username and email ID reusable before deletion
To make sure that your username and email ID is changed before you finally deactivate your account, here a few steps that you need to follow;
- Open browser and sign in to twitter.
- Click on your profile icon and go to ‘settings’.
- You will see a username field in the settings menus, here click on ‘choose a new username’ and write down any username that you will not be using ever again.
- Then in the email ID field you should write down any alternative email ID that you own.
- Once you this, you will be sent a confirmation email to the new email account you have added.
- You have to open that email account in another browser and confirm the change through email. You this by clicking on the link sent by the twitter team to your email. This link will then confirm your change.
- In this way now your original email address and username can be available for reuse.
OK, so are my tweets deleted from the search engines if I delete my account?
The answer to this question is NO. All your tweets can not be removed from the ‘search’ of the search engines. Why is that so? This is because search engines index information and do not have a system of ‘rechecking’ whether that tweet is still present or not. A search engine would not know if the account is deleted or not and when someone searches for a specific tweet it can be shown as search results on google or Bing, although the links may not open. In this case if your cached data still appears on google or Bing you can always send them a request to take down that data. There are ways in which you can either temporarily or permanently delete URL search history of the sites you own. For further information on this you can visit this link;
Other points to remember
In case you are having trouble with your twitter account, that is that some of your tweets may be missing or you seem to have incorrect followers, or you may be getting suspicious DMs or have had your account compromised in one way or another. If that is the trouble, then deactivating your account can be of little to no use. What you need to in situations like these is to refer to contact support or read twitter’s troubleshooting articles.
Lastly with twitter’s motto “you are what you tweet” you should be careful of what you say, because whatever you share can be viewed instantly worldwide. It is a rather long and tedious road to covering up your mistakes by deleting your account and removing your tweets from search history. As it is famously said prevention is better than cure, hence rather than overwhelming yourself and being impulsive with your ideas on twitter, you should remember that it is a long road to removing your digital footprint, might as well make careful and well calculated footprints. The private information you give to twitter is used by them to show you ads which you may be attracted to or can be given to a third party in case of emergency political or law and order situations. Hence be aware of all this information whilst making a twitter account, so you can use the social media site to its full potential.
