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Furries and internet worry of history erasure as Twitter and Google announce plans to close inactive accounts

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Google has recently announced its intention to deactivate accounts if the user is inactive after two years of time. This comes only a week after Twitter had announced that they too will be looking to liquidate accounts that lack activity. Soon after this announcement the accounts of deceased on Twitter were found to be suspended for “Terms of Use Violations”, in a similar vein to someone who used the site to spam or harass others.

Dying, as it turns out, is against the rules.

Concerns over history lost

This sudden turn in the web 2.0 landscape has caused a stirring of concern and frustration. This required some clarification, as Google later indicated that YouTube videos would not be deleted from these inactive accounts, despite the earlier announcing indicated YouTube accounts would be impacted.

But despite the backpedal statements made, it has highlighted the need for end of life planning and retention of data outside these large corporate entities in order to retain history. The accounts of the late Rapid T. Rabbit and Shon Howell have already been suspended from their inactive Twitter accounts. It was noted that some of these accounts were suspended due to being hacked after the original user’s passing. A concern that is pushing these organizations to push for these inactive account removals.

Furries have started to take requests for archival purposes. Christopher Polt has announced a Google form people can fill out with requests for archival of fur fans who have passed on and whose accounts have not been impacted yet.

A request from Fang, Feather, and Fin: if you know the Twitter account of a furry who has passed away and therefore is liable to be purged under the company's new inactivity policy, please fill out the form in the next tweet and we will try to preserve it in the archive. – CBPolt

A better and more respectful means of protection?

If the concerns of these large corporations is that our accounts will be used for nefarious means after we pass on or are not active on them, then there are other means to go about this rather than making it appear that the dead person violated rules within their lifetime.

FurAffinity, for all the criticism it has received for being slow to implement modern sensibilities, is already ahead of the curve here. They can denote statuses upon the user with symbols before the username. One that was introduced was the “deceased” status which is symbolized by an infinity symbol. For instance, this is the page of the late Lemonade Coyote, an EMT who lost their life while in the line of duty, shows how this would be utilized.

Corporate social media could utilize symbols in the same way to denote users who have passed on, and lock down the ability to sign in and make any posts or updates so that it would prevent a hacker from grave robbing the accounts of the past. If they choose to delete non-public facing data behind closed doors, that would be one thing, but we should always be wary of removing items that are a matter of public record.

Comments

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Just more narrative curation. They won't want anyone speaking counter-narrative thoughts, and there's a lot of that in the form of old and abandoned accounts.

We've always been at war with Eurasia, never mind what those old accounts say.

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I don't know much about Fang, Feather, and Fin but I submitted a request for Ivic's Twitter to be archived. People seem to have no respect for history these days. Only what's new and shiny matters.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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Perhaps Jason Scott and Archive Team will to a Distributed Preservation of Service Attack. I've found an extension called Twitter Print Styles that allows you to save some things on Twitter like individual threads, but saving an archive of someone's Twitter account in whole can only be done from inside the account of the deceased person; therefore a close friend or loved one would have to do that.

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An update: Archive.org has this with some Twitter archives. https://archive.org/details/twitterstream

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It looks like the bans on inactive accounts are now having an impact on active accounts.

If you had a side account you used for anything that became inactive and was suspended for inactivity, your main account can get flagged for "ban evasion" as a result.

Artists have been reporting on these odd suspensions recently.

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How would they know there's any link between the two?

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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The verbiage of these mysterious banning highlight the ban evasion, and the original suspensions of inactive accounts highlighted in the media indicate the suspensions were a result of a violation due to terms of service.

It seems very likely that if a previous coder in Twitter was banning people for ban evasion they would have code that would look for suspended accounts tied to an email address on sign up and catch someone doing it that way. Is it an absolute? No. But the thing about cause and effect is that if you go in and start making changes without knowing the impacts it will have to a system as a whole then you're going to learn of those impacts in due time, and in production.

I would guess this has probably been fixed somehow in the meanwhile.

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I'm afraid I wasn't clear. I meant how would Twitter know the two accounts were related. I thought each account needs a unique email address.

Well I suppose we can only speculate. Perhaps it recorded both accounts being logged in from the same Tweetdeck or something like that.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Hmm, do you check what you write?
You know how to answer your own question.

He who goes to NSA type lengths to cover his tracks online.

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