Did Twitter already delete inactive accounts in the past? When I created my account in 2008 my preferred handle was taken by an empty account that seemingly never posted anything. With this recent news about account deletions I was curious if maybe I could get it, so I checked it again. I was surprised to see that it’s now a very active account with a “joined in” date in 2014. So it looks like the old inactive one was deleted at some point and then the handle was re-registered by someone else. Either that or the “joined in” date isn’t accurate.
My understanding is that twitter employees were able to manually delete an inactive account in the past to free up the handle for use. I know a couple people who got their preferred handles that way.
I'm sure they've at least proposed it before - some years ago I setup a recurring reminder to tweet on each of my Twitter accounts every six months "to prevent account deletion".
