How to deactivate your Twitter account

Here is how you can permanently deactivate your Twitter account.

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Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, drawing in users of all sorts of demographics and walks of life. While it can be a powerful tool for communication, Twitter is not without its shortcomings. If you’re ready to ditch the social media platform and its shenanigans altogether, we’re going to show you how to deactivate your Twitter account.

How to deactivate your Twitter account

how to delete twitter account

To deactivate your Twitter account, you’ll need to follow these steps. The process is the same whether you’re using Twitter on a desktop or via the mobile app.

  • Open ‘Settings and Privacy’
  • Select ‘Your account’
  • Select ‘Deactivate your account’
  • Choose a reactivation period
  • Select ‘Deactivate’

When you decide to deactivate your account, Twitter forces you to select a reactivation period. Essentially, logging back into your account during the reactivation period will reactivate your deleted account. This allows you a window of time to retrieve your account and all of its associated information should you have a change of mind. If the reactivation window closes, your account will be permanently deleted. Twitter’s two reactivation period options are 30 days and 12 months.

Twitter recommends that you download your Twitter data prior to deactivation. This will allow you to retain some relevant information associated with your account after it’s been wiped from the internet. The link to download your account data can be found on Twitter’s deactivation screen.

That’s how you can deactivate your Twitter account. Once it’s been fully deactivated, nobody will be able to see your past tweets or any other information related to your profile. We recommend you put some serious consideration into making a final decision. We here at Shacknews frequently cover the business moves of Twitter, so be sure to stick around for timely updates and helpful guides.

News Editor

Donovan is a young journalist from Maryland, who likes to game. His oldest gaming memory is playing Pajama Sam on his mom's desktop during weekends. Pokémon Emerald, Halo 2, and the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 were some of the most influential titles in awakening his love for video games. After interning for Shacknews throughout college, Donovan graduated from Bowie State University in 2020 with a major in broadcast journalism and joined the team full-time. He is a huge Scream nerd and film fanatic that will talk with you about movies and games all day. You can follow him on twitter @Donimals_

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  • reply
    April 25, 2022 3:10 PM

    Donovan Erskine posted a new article, How to deactivate your Twitter account

    • reply
      April 25, 2022 3:12 PM

      Just so you know, when I deleted my twitter account many years ago, somebody else was able to create an account with the same name. idgaf but you might.

    • reply
      April 25, 2022 8:00 PM

      I only ever used my Twitter account to spam their API with requests in a Python script until I got rate-limited. Considering I don't use the site, I'm costing them money and they don't have any of my content to monetize.

      ...I should make more accounts...

      • reply
        April 26, 2022 6:14 AM

        That's my main method as well.

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        April 26, 2022 7:52 AM

        I had the idea once to make a bot that would just tweet out the entirety of War and Peace, 140 characters at a time (so, this was before they doubled the limit). I thought lol this will take years at the rate they limit you to. Never bothered doing it.

        I just did some back of the napkin math which I might have wrong.

        I went to Project Gutenberg and downloaded a flat file English translation of War and Peace.

        https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-0.txt

        Opening it up in Notepad++ shows it is 3,359,405 bytes long. Some of that is chapter listings, Project Gutenberg credits, etc. and maybe there's some double byte characters in there but just for shits let's say this is the length of W&P in characters.

        3,359,405 characters / 140 characters = 23,995.75 posts.

        Granted if you break it up by words rather than characters it might be more posts but that number's pretty close probably.

        Twitter ironically is blocked at work so I have to go off of Google summaries but one thing I'm reading says that APIs are limited to 300 posts over 3 hours. So. basically 100 posts per hour.

        23,995.75 posts / 100 posts per hour = 239.9575 hours.

        239.9575 hours / 24 hours in a day = ~9.998 days

        Even allowing for overages for word breaks that's like less than two weeks, provided I don't hit some other super secret rate limiter.

        So... not "lol years"

        Anyone wants to check my math on that feel free. Hell if anyone wants to steal this idea and do it feel free. For all I know it's been done before.

    • reply
      April 26, 2022 6:57 AM

      but how am I going to berate my ISP for their shitty service?

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        April 26, 2022 7:30 AM

        My wife went tried going through Samsung support to get a refund for one of their fuckups on a phone repair for over 2 months, but it wasn't until I started bitching on twitter that the issue got resolved.

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      April 26, 2022 9:16 AM

      Good to know. I'm not getting rid of my twitter account. Its still useful to spam contest entries and complain to brands. I'm not going to use it for anything else. But I'm sure I know people IRL that will need this.

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