There is a tendency to deactivate social media accounts including Twitter and Facebook. It happens due to different reasons: unstable political situation, the risk of being followed, intention to protect one’s personal data.

Also, a lot of users believe that they are wasting their time on social networks. B

esides an inclination to leave their social networks, people are often compelled to stay. One of the main reasons for that is that they are afraid they would not be able to recover their digital memories – such as photos – once they had left a social network.

Whatever the reason is, Twitter users need a clear mechanism of an account’s deactivation. Abandoning an account is not an option — it can be hacked. There is no opportunity to keep tweets a user liked from other users, the list of people they followed — nothing but their own tweets and retweets.

Kaspersky recommends that users follow this advice to deactivate a Twitter profile, but keep the memories:

* Go to twitter.com and log in to your account.

* Click on your profile avatar in the top right corner, and in the drop-down menu select Settings and Privacy.

* From the menu on the left, select Account, scroll down, and click the Request your archive button, which you’ll find by “Your Tweet archive.”

A ZIP archive will then be created and sent at the e-mail address. It will include a list of tweets sorted by month, a graph of the user’s Twitter activity.

There is also an option to delete Twitter account permanently. A user’s data won’t be deleted from its servers and will be used for any purpose stated in the user agreement, but the account will become unreachable on twitter.com; nobody outside the company will be able to see it.