How to delete your Twitter account

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley joins the Live show to explain how someone can delete their Twitter account.

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AKIKO FUJITA: Well, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has already prompted many users to leave the platform. The social media company reporting mass deactivations and some big fluctuations in follower accounts this week. Twitter says the movement has been organic despite the timing of the changes, but that begs the question, how do you go about shutting down your account? For a deeper dive, we've got Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley in this week's "Tech Support." And Dan, you know, it feels like it's as simple as just deleting the account, but is there more to it?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated because social networks make it that way, just to keep you hooked forever. So lets just give you a quick rundown of how to delete your account if you want to. By the way, poor Katy Perry lost, like, 200,000 something followers. So I don't know what she did wrong, but whew. So, real quick, if you have your account on either the web, iOS, or Android, you can deactivate it, but then there's a period of time you have to wait to actually delete it.

So here's how you would deactivate it. You sign in, and then you click your profile image, and then select Settings and Privacy. That's going to take you to another menu where you'll see something called Account Options. Then you'll scroll down the screen to the area that says Deactivate Your Account. Now here's where it gets a little bit tricky. When you do this, you're going to get two options-- 30 days or one year. They'll show up as 12 months. I think we can do that math.

When you select that, you're basically choosing how long you want of a waiting period before the account actually deletes. Select 30 days-- it's the least amount of time-- and then you are essentially set. Just sign out of Twitter. If you do, however, go back to your account, sign in, that 30 days goes away. That one year goes away. And your account is no longer deactivated. It's just a regular account. So you have to be careful that you actually stay off of Twitter for that entire time period.

Now, that will entail signing out of any other services that you may have your account signed into. For instance, if you use TweetDeck or use Twitter as your main sign-in for something else online, you're going have to make sure that you deactivate your account or de-link your account from those services. Otherwise, it'll call up Twitter, and then your account will no longer be deactivated. It'll be active again.

So after that 30-day or one-year period, though, you will be able to fully delete your account and kiss Twitter goodbye. But just because you're kissing it goodbye doesn't mean that all of your old tweets are going away. They're still available online because everything on the internet is permanent. But there is a way to get them away, for the most part. And there are some apps that you can get that are third party providers that will connect to your Twitter account and scrub everything that you've ever posted, including likes, retweets, and actual tweets, from existence.

Again, not everything disappears on the internet. There's the Wayback Machine that can pull things up. But you still will be able to, for the most part, kiss all of this goodbye and not have to worry about Twitter going forward. We were just discussing during the break how there's plenty of things that I wish I probably didn't post online from college that I really, really want to get rid of. So I may be doing this later.

But once you have all of that done, you should be done with Twitter entirely. I do just want to point out, though, that you are going to be using third party services. So be sure that you trust them when you enter your information because you are going to have to enter your full login for those services to get access to your account and delete what your tweets are.

AKIKO FUJITA: Dan, I'm curious to get your take on these deactivations that we saw. You mentioned Katy Perry's account as one. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene saw more than 90,000 followers added to her account. Former President Barack Obama lost, according to NBC News, up to 300,000 followers. What do you think's going on?

DAN HOWLEY: I think it could be that there were some people that wanted to leave and some people that wanted to join. Obviously, the idea that Obama-- I don't know where Katy Perry fits into this, but the idea that Obama would lose users, this is going to be just a political issue, Obama being obviously a Democrat. People who are left leaning not necessarily liking the idea that Elon Musk taking over and wanting to allow all forms of speech on the platform, regardless of whether or not they're disinformation, misinformation, or hate speech. It seems to be that that's not going to be a priority for him to moderate.

And then that brings in people who have been claiming that Twitter is silencing them, which a lot of conservatives have been doing. And then they may float to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it could also just be that we saw an explosion of bots. It could be that some bots were taken down. I know they said that it's organic, but that's a real huge amount of people. And Twitter only has 200,000 plus-- sorry, 200 million plus users. It's not a massive platform. So that kind of loss is huge for Twitter itself.

So I can't see how that's actual users entirely, not to say that some of them aren't, but there's got to be some kind of issue there with bots, duplicate accounts maybe, things along those lines that were coming and going. And that's why we saw that explosion.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, Twitter certainly not big on numbers when you compare it to other social media platforms, but big on influence, which is why so many people are still sticking around. Dan Howley, thanks so much for that.