Elon Musk is “purging” inactive Twitter accounts.
The 51-year-old CEO of the microblogging site - which he took over for $44 billion late last year - has warned that users might see their “follow count” become lesser but gave no timeline.
He tweeted: “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.”
Elon first teased this policy back in December as he intended to “start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts.”
He added: “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets and no log in for years.”
The SpaceX founder did not provide any clarification what this meant for the accounts of people dearly departed or if loved ones could archive their posts.
In reply to Elon’s message, John Carmack “STRONGLY” urged Elon to think again for the sake of the historical record and compared the policy to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
He tweeted: “I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you are actually deleting inactive accounts and all their historic tweets, I would STRONGLY urge you to reconsider.
“Letting people know how many “active” followers they have is good information, but deleting the output of inactive accounts would be terrible. I still see people liking ten-year-old tweets I made, but the threads are already often fragmented with deleted or unavailable tweets. Don’t make it worse!
Some may scoff at any allusion between Twitter and ancient libraries, but while the burning of the library of Alexandria was a tragedy, scrolls and books that were tossed in the trash just because nobody wanted to keep them are kind of worse.
“Save it all!”
