Want to get rid of your Twitter account? You might want to delete your account for any number of reasons, for example, you don’t want to use the platform anymore, you want to start an account from fresh, or you’re closing down a business account.
Depending on your reasons for deleting your account, you might want to get things done as quickly as possible. Thankfully, Twitter enables you to delete your account in a few simple steps. While there is a 30-day deactivation period, your account will no longer be visible (for the most part) during this time.
In this post, we reveal exactly how to delete your Twitter account. We also explain some precautions you may want to take to ensure all of your information is permanently deleted, and offer alternatives to account deletion that may be more suitable for some users.
Before you delete your Twitter account
Before you go ahead and delete your account, make sure you’re doing so for the right reasons and have taken any necessary steps required. We’ll go into more detail on these below but here are a few quick questions to answer before you deactivate:
- Are you looking to change your username? If so, you don’t need to delete your account and start a new one. Twitter allows you to change your username to one that isn’t already taken. This way, you won’t lose any of your followers and you can choose if you want to keep any or all of your Tweets.
- Are you planning to set up a new Twitter account with the same username or email address associated with your current one? If so, you should do this before you deactivate your account.
- Do you want to save some of the information in your Twitter account? In this case, you should request your archived data before you go ahead with the deactivation process.
- Do you simply want to get rid of a lot of Tweets, but can’t face the hassle of deleting them one by one? Instead of deleting your account and starting over, you can use an app such as TweetDelete to bulk delete your Tweets.
How to delete your Twitter account permanently
Thankfully, deleting your account just takes a few simple steps. To delete your account, you need to deactivate it. This tells Twitter you want to delete it. Deactivation will immediately remove your account (so people won’t see your profile or Tweets on the platform), but full deletion won’t happen until 30 days after deactivation.
Here’s how to delete your Twitter account from a web browser:
- Log in to your Twitter account.
- From the main page, click the three-dot menu icon on the left sidebar and select Settings and privacy.
- Select Deactivate your account.
- Read through the information and click Deactivate.
- You’ll be asked to confirm your password, then you can click Deactivate one more time.
How to delete your account on the mobile app:
- Log in to your Twitter account via the mobile app.
- Click your profile picture and select Settings and privacy from the menu.
- Under your username, select Account.
- Click Deactivate your account.
- Read the messages and select Deactivate.
- You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then you can hit Deactivate one final time.
What happens after I deactivate my account?
Once you’ve confirmed your account deactivation, your Twitter profile and any associated information will no longer be accessible via the platform. However, it will take up to 30 days for Twitter to start the process of deleting your account. Full account deletion can take up to an additional week.
Within the 30-day period, you can reactivate your account at any time just by logging in and confirming reactivation. This is good news for anyone who has deactivated their account in error or has a change of heart a few days or weeks after closing their account.
However, it does mean that your username and email address will remain tied to that account for those 30 days, so you can’t use them on another account.
Will any of my Tweets still be visible?
Note that some profiles and Tweets might still show up online in search engines or internet archives.
Search engines
Deleted Tweets or Tweets from deactivated or deleted accounts can show up in search results for some time (until those pages are recrawled). If links to deleted profiles and Tweets exist, clicking on them will take you to an error page, but their content could still be visible on the search engine results page itself.
If you’re really in a hurry to have certain content removed, you can request that Google delete specific Tweets:
- Log in to your Google account (or create one).
- Copy the Twitter URL you want to remove.
- Go to Google’s “Remove outdated content” page.
- Paste the Twitter URL you copied earlier.
- Click the red REQUEST REMOVAL button.
Bing and Yahoo offer similar services for deleting select URLs. Note that you can only request the removal of URLs that no longer exist. So for example, you can’t request that a Tweet be removed if it still exists on the Twitter platform.
Internet archives
It’s also possible to view some old tweets via an internet archive service. For example, the Library of Congress used to archive every single Tweet, but stopped the practice in 2017. Wayback Machine is another service that saves Tweets; the company doesn’t disclose exactly how it decides which Twitter pages to archive, but Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says:
When asked if Donald Trump’s Tweets were saved automatically, Graham’s answer was “Pretty much. That’s an easy one.”
But, let’s face it, unless you’re a celebrity, politician, or another public figure, it’s unlikely Wayback Machine will be saving your Tweets by default. That said, it does offer a feature called Save Page Now, which lets users archive a specific URL. Via this method, it’s quite possible for one or more of your Tweets to end up in the archive. Once they’re there, removing them is difficult as Wayback Machine only accepts removal requests from the domain owner.
How do I change my username or move it to another account?
If you want to change the username on your existing account, you can simply click the three-dot menu icon on your main account page, go to Settings and privacy > Account > Login and security, and change your username.
But what if you want to use your existing username on another account? You might assume that deactivating your account will immediately free up your username for use elsewhere. But this isn’t the case. The username on a deactivated account will remain unavailable for 30 days (until the account is fully deleted).
Instead, you should change your username on your existing account to free up the username you want to use. Then change the second account username to the one you’ve just freed up. You should make the change as quickly as possible because once the username is freed up, anyone can grab it.
You have to make a similar switch if you want to use a particular email address on another account (as Twitter only allows one account per email address). Although, if you’re a Gmail user, there is a way around this.
Gmail doesn’t recognize dots in email addresses but Twitter does. So you can add the same email address but include a random dot. Twitter will recognize it as a new email address, but in reality, you’ll have multiple Twitter profiles linked to the same email account.
For example, the above three email addresses all look the same to Gmail but different to Twitter.
How do I save my data before I delete my account?
When you delete your Twitter accounts, chances are you might want to keep some of the data stored on the platform. Twitter makes it simple to download all of your data, including Tweets, media, and messages.
Here’s how to save your Twitter data:
- Go to the three-dot menu icon and select Settings and privacy.
- Under Data and permissions, click Your Twitter data.
- Enter your password and select Confirm.
- Then click the Request archive button next to Twitter. There is also the option to request Periscope data which will lead you to your Periscope account (if you have one).
- Once your data is ready, you’ll receive a notification within Twitter as well as an email with a link. Now, when you go into Your Twitter data, there should be a Download archive button. Click this to download your data.
What if I just want to delete all my Tweets?
Instead of deleting your entire account, you may simply want to delete your Tweets. One method is to go through and delete them one by one. To do this, you click the dropdown arrow in the upper righthand corner of the Tweet and select Delete.
Of course, depending on how many you want to remove, this could be extremely tedious (and carpal tunnel-inducing). Instead, you might find it helpful to use a third-party app such as TweetDelete or TweetEraser.
The free version of TweetDelete allows you to erase up to 3,200 Tweets at a time and you can decide how far back you want to go with your deletion. TweetEraser and the paid version of TweetDelete both offer the option to delete all of your Tweets in one go.
See also: Best VPNs for Twitter
As mentioned above, Google, Yahoo, and Bing allow you to request the removal of individual URLs from their respective results pages.
If you want to avoid this happening altogether, you can use the protected Tweets option within Twitter. This should prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your Tweets, although any new followers will now have to request permission to view your posts.
To change your Tweets from public to protected, click the three-dot menu icon and go to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety. Under Tweets, check the box next to Protect your Tweets.
You can view account information, Tweets, likes, direct messages, blocked and muted accounts, personalization data, lists, and more. Note that this file is for reference only and can not be used as a backup to restore data to your account.
