Mariann Hardey’s father passed away unexpectedly just over ten years ago. But he lives on through his Twitter account. It only has 42 followers and it’s locked by Hardey’s dad so only those 42 people can see it. And with a common first name and last name based username, it’s likely to be a desirable piece of online real estate.
“I regularly contact him on social media,” says Hardey, a sociology professor at Durham Business School in the UK. The profile — whose latest tweet praised Hardey for her bravery in getting a wisdom tooth removed — is doubly important to the professor because the profile picture features a kitten, Penny, that Hardey’s family lost last year.
That could soon change. That’s what Twitter CEO Elon Musk said announced a purge of dormant accounts – previously claimed to be 1.5 billion on the platform. As a result, Hardey’s father’s Twitter account, which has not been updated since March 14, 2012, could soon be wiped from the Internet. “He now has a granddaughter he’s never met, and his jokes and social media content show her who he was and what we meant to each other,” says Hardey. “Social media is about connections.”
It’s a move that, as with so much on Musk’s Twitter, can be chaotic. One-word or letter Twitter accounts, long-dormant profiles of celebrities who have passed away, such as Linkin Park’s Chester Benningtonand cherished brands that have left Twitter or been taken over by squatters, such as @Nintendo 3dscan all be taken over by new owners.
“It may sound like the closure of a few dormant accounts, but the result is the reckless compromise of massive amounts of evidence, all to create a synthetic marketplace for usernames,” said William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation coalition. Kilbride likens Musk’s decision to “burning public records to sell personalized license plates.” It’s just the latest example of major platforms making changes to the durability of content hosted on their platforms, after Imgur and Tumblr changed their pornography hosting policies and removed massive chunks of their content. Musk has said deleted accounts will be “archived”, without providing more information.
The planned purge is especially problematic because Twitter is seen by many, including Musk himself, as a de facto public plaza of the internet, large parts of which could soon disappear. “When you have these giant global systems, changes have to be made very carefully,” said Mar Hicks, an associate professor of the history of technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
It’s one of the dangers of private ownership of public platforms that act as quasi-utilities. “Twitter has been relatively small, but it’s had a huge impact because it’s where journalists go,” says Hicks. “For it to fall into chaos in multiple ways is really dangerous.” An example of what could potentially be lost if the plan goes ahead: the loss (or repurposing) of Syrian activist Raed Fares, whose account— and record of human rights violations — remains crystallized in amber after his murder in November 2018.
