How long does it take Twitter to delete an account?

Answer

Once you’ve confirmed your account deactivation, it will no longer be accessible via the platform. Your profile and any information associated with it will not disappear straight away though, as may take up to 30 days for Twitter to start the deletion process. The full removal of your account can take an additional week too.

Permanently Delete Twitter Account । How to Delete Twitter Account Permanently

Decided to investigate the case of a Baptist preacher and hate-monger who had been stealing other people’s tweets [ here ] and using them as his own for years. Eventually, Twitter was notified about this thievery. This is when I got interested in how long it might take before @JohnKHaris would no longer exist on Twitter. The first step was to create an account that followed the same users as Haris did in order to be able to pick up when he deleted his account — should that happen. Once I started checking my feed, I realized something else: while some accounts will disappear within minutes after they are reported, others can last for weeks or months afterward with no resolution to the problem. It seems Twitter has at least two processes, which I call “Twitter’s Inbox” and “Twitter’s Attention.”

An account can be reported for a variety of reasons: spam, abuse, impersonating another person or entity, inciting violence, or other illegal activities. My investigation started with an account that was clearly stealing tweets from other people and using them as his own (a clear violation of the terms of service). It was also someone who used violent imagery to describe others. What I found is an ongoing process where reports sometimes are addressed in hours, but just as frequently left unattended for weeks before being acted on by Twitter staff. These findings beg the question: what accounts exist on Twitter? Are they all active? Whose responsibility is it to remove a user when an account shouldn’t exist in the first place?

How to Delete your Twitter account Permanently

First, let’s review what might be going on in Twitter’s inbox. In most cases I investigated, the action that occurred was either a request for further information or a request by Twitter to stop violating their terms of service and then an automatic closure after the account owner ignored Twitter’s requests. There are many other reasons why accounts could be deleted immediately or remain active though they have been reported but not acted upon. For example:

An investigation concludes no action is needed due to misreporting. The user is told to contact [email protected] if his username is available Twitter has decided to leave the account as it exists because it hasn’t broken any rules If all of @JohnKHaris’ followers had reported his account, and if all of them had done so at the same time (most likely not) then it’s possible that Twitter could have been overwhelmed and simply asked everyone to wait a little bit longer If thousands of people reported the @JohnKHaris account as spam simultaneously, there would be no need for Twitter staff to investigate; instead they could tell everyone the account has been suspended.

One explanation I heard was that some accounts are never deleted because they might be important sources in an investigation. On one hand, this makes sense: if you have a particular threat or criminal on your system who is using several aliases in order to avoid detection, those aliases can be identified by looking at his followers (either by their public profile or by going through their recent tweets). On the other hand, this is not a good enough reason to keep an account around and active. While Twitter’s Inbox seems to have a threshold for deleting accounts, at some point, the Twitter staff makes the decision to move on from whatever process they’ve started and either close or leave a report open without acting on it.

Twitter’s process: When reports are received, Twitter tries to reach out via email or phone in order to verify that “someone” is controlling the user. If someone does reply, then something else must happen; otherwise, the account remains active. I suspect there is also some sort of flagging system where reported users can be identified as being impersonating another person or entity (for example