Twitter needs to archive more than just accounts of deceased users

Microblogging platform Twitter recently announced plans to delete inactive accounts. After a public outcry it said it would delay those plans.
Originally Twitter planned to purge accounts where the owner had not signed in for more than six months. The purge was set to happen on Dec. 11. But then users complained that the purge would eliminate the accounts of deceased users.
Twitter said it is delaying its plan to remove inactive accounts until it can come up with a way to memorialize the accounts of people who’ve died.
But I think Twitter needs to go further and allow people to request permanent archiving of historically significant Twitter accounts as well. These include the accounts of political candidates, businesses that were acquired or failed, and interesting temporary accounts like promotional campaigns for movies and TV shows.
Another worthy area for Twitter archiving would be grassroots campaigns around political issues.
For instance, from Dec. 18, 2011, to Dec. 18, 2012, I ran a Twitter account called TSA Rants. The purpose of @TSArants was to aggregate complaints about the ineffective, wasteful and demeaning U.S. Transportation Security Administration.
All told, @TSArants aggregated more than 23,000 complaints about the TSA in that one year. It was a worthwhile newsgathering experience.
I resurrected TSA Rants a few days ago after reading news stories about Twitter’s plans to remove inactive accounts from the platform. I didn’t want it deleted and thought it might be a good time to reexamine the Transportation Security Administration.
I had hoped that by now public outcry would have led politicians to reform the TSA or, better yet, privatize it. But I was wrong.
At the time I ran @TSArants, the TSA was a scandal-plagued agency that many citizens wanted gone. But after a while people began to accept that the incompetent government agency was firmly established and wasn’t going anywhere.
TSA Rants followed a bunch of like-minded Twitter accounts dedicated to exposing problems with the Transportation Security Administration, but 20 of those have since stopped tweeting. I think those anti-TSA accounts should be saved to preserve that moment in time.
One problem is that accounts like TSA Rants primarily retweeted other people’s observations of TSA misdeeds. If those citizen-journalist accounts are deleted for inactivity, then TSA Rants would be full of “This Tweet is unavailable” messages or no indication that those tweets ever existed.
I suspect the latter would happen because when I stopped TSA Rants, I had 23,000 retweets. When I started it back up the other day, it had 19,000 retweets.
As readers of this blog know, I’m against efforts to delete information from the web. I’ve written many times about the ephemeral nature of online information in my series The Failed Promise of Digital Content.
My suggestion to Twitter would be to delete only those inactive accounts where the person didn’t tweet anything. If they contributed anything original to the public discourse on Twitter, i.e. more than just retweets, then that account should be kept.
But I understand that Twitter is a business and should do what’s in its best interests. Still, I think it would be in the company’s best interest to preserve the conversations its platform has fostered.

Photo: Twitter by Christopher Corneschi. (Creative Commons)

Related articles:

Twitter will remove inactive accounts and free up usernames in December (The Verge; Nov. 26, 2019)

Twitter halts plan to remove inactive accounts until it can memorialize dead users (The Verge; Nov. 27, 2019)

Fears raised over Twitter’s deceased person policy, and one possible solution (9to5Mac; Nov. 27, 2019)