There isn't anything unique about your account on most social media platforms. This isn't a "plant your flag" situation like when trying to prevent identity theft. You don't need to register your account before a bad actor does. Sure, I created an online account with the IRS, credit bureaus, etc. before somebody else could. That's important because they are tied to unique identifiers like your SSN, etc. But somebody could just create a social media account impersonating you even if you already have an account on that social network. There isn't anything enforcing the uniqueness.
My Twitter account has 140K+ followers and impersonators keep making copies that they use for cryptocurrency scams. So that's why I'm personally a little sensitive to deleting it, even if I've mostly committed to leaving that hellhole.
Counter point - why is it an issue to wipe the account of its content and update the bio to simply say the owner is no longer on social media and any other accounts you come across are not them.
Removing your account completely from Twitter makes it immediately available for anyone else to take, and for larger accounts you can bet theres a whole host of automated monitoring going on, ready to nab it and use it for easy profit.
Keeping the account doesn't have to mean you're 'giving away' any info. Hell delete it and instantly recrate it if thats the worry.
> Removing your account completely from Twitter makes it immediately available for anyone else to take,
Do you have a source for this? The only thing i can find is a random tweet from Elmo in 2023. I deleted my twitter account in the 2022-ish timeframe, and the handle I had (created in 2007) was my first initial + last name, which I would think would be claimed by now. It's not, so I'm thinking that deleted account handles can't be reused.
It must have changed between when you worked there and now, because I just checked and I can't sign up with my old handle (despite it returning a "this account doesn't exist" error when attempting to view it).
I can’t find any evidence that the plan outlined in that article was actually launched. The owner of Twitter says a lot of stuff, but most of it is made up.
That's pretty much the only upside to that blue checkmark these days. Making anyone able to buy one was a huge mistake, but they will at least do the minium check to see if someone else with that name already has a checkmark.
I was given a blue checkmark by pre-Musk Twitter because of the cryptocurrency scams. It was taken away in the early days of Musk Twitter when verification meant “anyone with $8.” Ironically, it was forced back against my will and without my paying for it, because Musk was embarrassed that larger accounts didn’t have checks. Obviously it didn’t serve any useful anti-impersonation purposes at that point, but I got free “Grok” I guess?
Will they? I'd actually be surprised if there are many people that, upon receiving a suspicious message from someone who claims to be Joe Schmoe, will actually go and check to see if a different account from Joe Schmoe with a blue check. I think it's much more likely that they're either going to recognize it as a scam right away, or they won't and they'll fall for it. In either of those cases, it doesn't help for the blue-checkmark-holder to keep their account.
There will always be someone falling for scams. No amount of safeguards will protect them if they do zero due diligence and the scammer is persistent enough. The checkmark isn't an end-all-be-all, but it's another small step someone can use to verify without too much hassle.
also, I just noticed "they" is ambiguous here. I meant "the twitter staff giving checkmarks". At least I hope they do some basic check before handing out a checkmark to an obvious impersonator.
I’m pretty sure GP is saying if you already had an account and you delete it, it’s trivially easy for someone to register with your old handle and impersonate you
Of course people can always impersonate you but the goal here is to prevent them from impersonating you with a social handle people knew you had.
If I recall correctly, the handle you deleted stays inactive and is unavailable to new registrants. This is present on Google at least, I assume it's the same elsewhere.
The concept of a handle goes beyond a username. If someone can construct a profile that looks like someone's profile on another site and contains approximately the words in the username, like _username or imusername instead of username, they might be able to impersonate it. In that case it would be good to have an active profile on that platform to counteract it.
That's an interesting point that I had not considered. In that case, your handle itself is the unique identifier. That said, if I recall correctly some sites do not recycle handles, but this is still an interesting point nonetheless.
