How to delete Twitter Account permanently

Twitter can be useful, interesting, and even hilarious, but it can also be an unbearable cesspit of hatred and abuse. It’s also a great way to hear views from people who don’t have the same opinion as you, which none of us really want.

 But whether it’s trolling, social media fatigue, or concerns overt privacy, there are plenty of reasons to leave Twitter. The good news is that it’s very simple to kill your account, so read on to find out how.

However, we recommend caution when deleting your Twitter account. Twitter offers a grace period for undeleting your profile, but after that, it’s gone forever. So make sure you definitely want to scrap Twitter before going ahead with the deletion process.

How to delete your Twitter account

Follow these steps:

1. Sign into Twitter.com on the desktop version of the website. You can’t do it from an app

2. Go into your Account Settings

3. Click on ‘Deactivate my account’ at the bottom of the page

4. Click ‘Okay, fine, deactivate account’

5. Enter your password and verify your decision

How to delete Twitter permanently

When you deactivate your Twitter account, Twitter will retain all of your user data for a 30-day period. Once that’s over, Twitter starts purging your data from its systems, which takes about a week. When that’s done, your Twitter account is gone forever.

If you log into your account during the 30 days, you will reactivate your account. To delete it permanently, you’ll need to start the 30-day process all over again.

It’s important to note that if you just want to change your username or e-mail address, you don’t need to delete your account. You can make these changes very easily in your account settings.

Twitter also points out that although account deactivation happens almost immediately, some content from your account may still be viewable on Twitter.com for a few days.

Also, Twitter has no control over third-party websites – like Google or Bing – that cache content for quicker loading. This means content from your Twitter profile may still be available elsewhere on the internet.

If you want to create a new account with the same username or e-mail address immediately after deleting your old account, you’ll be stuck. To do this, you’ll need to switch out the e-mail on your soon-to-be-binned account first before you can use it on a new account. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the 30-day deactivation period to be completed before you can use the old username and e-mail address.