If you’re thinking of deleting your X account, I wouldn’t blame you (I’d only ask what took you so long). Things are wild over there right now, and stability sure isn’t on the horizon. However, before you take the nuclear option and say goodbye to Elon Musk and his ilk, consider not deleting your account: Don’t stay, mind you—just leave in a safer way.
Why deleting your X account is dangerous
When you initiate the deactivation process for your X account, it takes 30 days before your account is permanently deleted, tweets and all. However, once that 30 days is up, your username is fair game. After all, you deleted your account, and, therefore, relinquished your claim over the name. It now returns to the “people,” or at least the first person to notice its availability, where it can be used in a new account for as long as that user wants it.
This is the nature of the internet: Abandon a username, and someone else will snatch it up. But it isn’t something to be taken lightly. Sure, it doesn’t matter if some nobody wants to take over your novelty account “MarvelRocksDCSucks2012,” since your days of fighting about comic book movies on the internet are behind you. But if your X handle is your real name, the potential for problems escalates.
Obviously, this issue is most pressing for those with public personas. If you delete your X account, and someone takes over your handle, they can tweet as if they were you. Worse yet, with X Premium, they have the potential to “verify” themselves with a blue check. To the average X user, the tweets from this account would look like they were coming from you, no matter what the new owner of the account was posting. “DC is cinema” could be attached to your brand.
But you don’t need to be a celebrity or high profile person to worry about this potential impersonation. For better or worse, our identities are tied to social media these days. When your name is searched online, people will find that X account and anything they might have tweeted under your “name.”
While that’s bad enough, it can impact important opportunities in your life. Everyone from college admissions to job recruiters scours the internet for your digital footprint to evaluate whether or not you’re a good fit for whatever it is you’re applying for. They’re not going to take the time to investigate whether that X account is yours or not: They’re going to associate those tweets with you. The best course of action, then, is to abandon your account without deleting it altogether.
How to safely leave X
The first step is to delete all your posts. This would happen automatically 30 days after hitting X’s official “deactivate” button anyway, so it’s no different to do it yourself. The free option is to go through and delete your posts one-by-one. However, depending on how long you’ve had your account and how active you’ve been, that could take a long time.
Instead, you could use a deleter service like the appropriately named Tweet Deleter or Delete Tweet. With one of these services, you can sign in with your X credentials, and the service will wipe your account clean. They even delete likes, though that’s not quite as necessary since likes became private. Some of these services allow you to archive and save your deleted posts if you like, but you can also download an archive of your account through X itself if you’d like.
That said, these services cost money, ever since X did away with its free API. Tweet Deleter, for example, starts at $4.99 per month, which lets you get rid of 3,000 posts per month, while Delete Tweet starts at $5.99 per month. In addition, you need to connect your X account to these services, which means you’ll be handing over quite a bit of data. If you want the most private (and free) option possible, delete your posts by hand.
Once your posts (and likes) are dealt with, it’s time to close up shop. Start by heading to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Audience and tagging, then choose “Protect your posts.” If you do have any public information left attached to your account, such as likes, privatizing the account will prevent non-followers from seeing.
Next, go to your profile, then Edit profile, to delete any personal information in your bio, and replace your profile picture with, well, anything else. Finally, change your password to something impossible to guess. It’s the digital version of locking your door and throwing away the key.