Long-term Twitter Deactivation

September 10, 2020 4:10 PM

If I want to deactivate Twitter for more than 30 days, would it work to (1) deactivate my account, (2) reactivate at day 20-something, and (3) immediately deactivate for another 30 days? And just keep doing this over and over again?

As I understand it, Twitter has a 30-day deactivation period before it deletes your account. In this 30-day time period, you can reactivate it. After 30 days, you cannot. If I went in every 20-some days and reactivated/deactivated, could I "quit" Twitter the way one "quits" Facebook, returning from time to time (like annually) and still retain my data and connections?

posted by 10ch to Technology (4 answers total)

I deactivated my Twitter about 30 days ago (with no intent to reactivate), and when I was looking into doing that, as I understand it your interpretation is correct - reactivation resets the 30 day clock to zero, and you can deactivate again later (even if "later" is two minutes after reactivating). I didn't see anything about a limit of times that can be done, but what you want to do definitely looks to be possible.

I will say that you may find you may not want to reactivate at all after a couple weeks; even without a twitter account, you can still see tweets that people send you or that you see on other sites or whatever. You just don't have the constant hot vomit stream aimed straight at your eyeballs, and you can be much more selective about what you see.
posted by pdb at 4:25 PM on September 10, 2020

Best answer: Yes, have done this, can confirm it works. Send yourself reminders to sign in at 27-28 days so you don't lose the account permanently.
posted by kapers at 6:47 PM on September 10, 2020

It's also possible to download all of your tweets into a text file so if that's the only data you're worried about losing, you can do that and then just quit entirely.
posted by forza at 7:00 PM on September 10, 2020

If you want to force yourself to take a Twitter break (which may not be what you're up to here), what I've found works is changing my password to garbage to lock myself out. Just mash some keys, copy it, and paste it into the new password field. This forces me to do a password reset to log back in, which (for me) is a more effective speed bump than things like impulse blocking browser extensions.
posted by lostburner at 11:21 PM on September 11, 2020 [1 favorite]