How To Leave Twitter
How to scrub your twitter and lock your account.
Here’s a quick path to leaving twitter well, details follow:
- back up your twitter by downloading the archive
- delete your public tweets
- delete your direct messages (DMs) and likes
- leave a forwarding tweet (and maybe lock your account)
- Bonus: read my post about how to find your Twitter people on Mastodon.
To avoid someone else impersonating you by taking and using your handle, don’t delete your account. Deactivating your Twitter account means you lose control and choices about it; I do not recommend deactivating your account.
You can delete your information, sort of. Remember, Twitter has copies of everything you have posted to Twitter, and if their security and stability degrades, it may all become public or corrupted. This process is about doing what you can easily do by yourself to keep your data under wraps and from ads being run against your posts in the future.
Step 1: backup your account
You can (and will need to for later steps) download an archive of your twitter information for your own use and later reference. This may take days.
