Twitter has posted a policy regarding its users who have died, a sign that the micro-blogging service has grown so big that it needs to address that all-important fact of life: death.
Like the other social media giant, Facebook, which announced its deceased user policy in October, Twitter does not allow access to a departed person's account by family members and will not disclose any non-public information about the former user's profile.
Twitter will, at the request of the deceased's family, delete an account or make a backup of all of the person's public tweets.
The company said that it can be notified of a user's passing via email, mail or fax. The following info is required, as posted on the policy webpage:
1. Your full name, contact information (including email address), and your relationship to the deceased user.
2. The username of the Twitter account, or a link to the profile page of the Twitter account.
3. A link to a public obituary or news article.
Twitter now boasts some 200 million unique visitors a month, according to its executives. The Library of Congress decided in April to archive all of Twitter users' "tweets," or 140 character-long public text messages, since the service began in 2006.
Over 50 million tweets are typed out every day.
The phenomenon's cultural impact in the United States has grown to such an extent that MTV felt compelled to hire its first Twitter jockey.
Facebook, meanwhile, has risen to the top of the social media heap with half a billion users worldwide as of last month.
The rising mountain of social media-driven digital information is sure to change the role of some historians from the recovering of rare texts to the sifting through reams of electronic minutia.
Overall, even though some of its users will inevitably pass away, it seems that social media is here to stay.
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