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    How to Quit Twitter—Safely

    Heading off to Mastodon, or just cutting back on social media? To preserve your data and your security, read this first.

    Twitter app with red cancel X over it. Illustration: Consumer Reports, Twitter

    As Twitter’s staff shrinks by the thousands and major companies pause their advertising in response to Elon Musk’s volatile leadership, many users have considered jumping ship, too.

    Mastodon, one ad-free alternative to Twitter built on open software, has exploded in popularity since Musk took over Twitter. This weekend, the nonprofit organization announced that Mastodon had passed the 2 million user mark; it had fewer than 500,000 before the Twitter turmoil began, according to a CNN interview with its founder. (This expansion might not all be at Twitter’s expense—Musk is telling advertisers Twitter’s growth is at an “all-time high,” according to the Verge.)

    More on social media

    Other riffs on Twitter are popping up, too: Post.news, a new entrant from Waze’s former CEO, is in testing—you can sign up for a spot on its (extremely long) waitlist. And existing networks like CounterSocial and Hive have seen waves of new signups.

    If you’re considering disengaging from Twitter, you have several good options. Here are four, from least to most final.

    1. Leave your account as is: a time capsule, with no further updates.
    2. Set your account to private, preventing people who don’t follow you yet from seeing what you’ve tweeted.
    3. Delete all your tweets, but leave your account alive.
    4. Go all the way and delete your account entirely.

    Here are the tips you need to choose the option that’s best for you, and some tools that’ll help you along.

    Option 1: Walk Away

    This one’s easy: Just stop tweeting.

    As long as you keep your account open and public (and Twitter remains in business), your Twitter history will remain for you and others to see. If you change your mind, you can pick up where you left off.

    Option 2: Go Private

    If you set your Twitter account to private mode, people who don’t follow you can’t see what you’ve tweeted. Twitter calls this “protecting your tweets.” New followers will have to ask permission before they can see your tweets—but anyone who already follows you can view and interact with your whole timeline.

    Why lock your account? It’s a precaution in case you’re concerned about an increase in hostile or abusive content on Twitter, or just a flood of new bots and fake accounts, as Musk promises to loosen up on content moderation, and Twitter’s engineering ranks dwindle.

    You can go private in the “privacy and safety” section of your Twitter settings. Here’s Twitter’s short help page on protecting your tweets. It’s reversible: If you want to take your account public again, it’s just another click.

    Option 3: Delete Your Tweets

    If you want to keep your followers, account, and handle, but you’re ready to memory-hole your lifetime of tweets, there are easy ways to scrub your timeline.

    Unless you want to go through your tweets one by one, though, you’ll need to turn to some outside help. My colleague Yael wrote a great guide to deleting your old tweets last year, suggesting several free and paid tools that can help get rid of some or all of your tweet history.

    But wait: If you don’t want your Throwback Thursdays and midnight musings gone forever, download your Twitter history before you wave goodbye. Twitter’s download tool will give you an archive of all your activity on the site. (Twitter says it could take a day or more to get your download link—and things might be running especially slowly right now, given Twitter’s reduced headcount. Wait until you can download the goods before you start deleting.)

    Here’s Twitter’s help article on the tool.

    Option 4: Delete Your Account

    Deleting your Twitter account is easy, but it won’t take effect immediately. First, you have to “deactivate” your account, which you can do from a Twitter settings page.

    There, you’ll pick a “reactivation period”: 30 days or 12 months. This is your regret window. If you change your mind and log back in within this timeframe, Twitter won’t delete your account. (You can always restart the process another time by deactivating your account again.)

    But if you don’t log back in during the reactivation period, your account will be deleted when it’s up.

    Here’s some more information from Twitter on deactivation and deletion.

    Before you hit the big red button, consider saving your account history using the instructions in Option 3 above. Your Twitter data download also comes with a list of your follows and followers, which you can use to look for your people on a new platform later.

    There is one good reason not to delete your account, though, even if you never intend to log in to Twitter again: Deleting your account means freeing up your handle—your username that starts with an @ sign. If someone else claims it, any past tweet that mentioned your handle will now point to the new person’s account. If the newcomer is a problematic poster or an impersonator, it could reflect poorly on you.

    Signing Up Elsewhere? Wait a Sec.

    If you’re fed up with Twitter, but you miss the fast flow of information and camaraderie, you might find it on another social network.

    But maybe you don’t need to fill the Twitter-shaped hole on your smartphone home screen. Almost a third of Americans say they go online “almost constantly,” Pew found in a 2021 survey. Perhaps a little less internet is a good thing.


    Headshot of CRO author Kaveh Waddell

    Kaveh Waddell

    Kaveh Waddell is an investigative reporter who worked at Consumer Reports from 2020 to 2023, focusing on digital rights and environmental justice. Before that, he reported on emerging technology at Axios and covered digital privacy and surveillance at The Atlantic. Follow Kaveh on X.