Leaving Las Pinterest: How to kill your social media accounts
By Nick Mediati @dtnick
You’ve decided that enough is enough—you’re going to nuke some of your social media accounts. Maybe you don’t use them. Maybe they’re too much of a distraction. Maybe you’ve grown bored of sepia tone. Maybe you’re tired of worrying about privacy concerns. Whatever the reason, we won’t judge you.
Most social networks actually make it fairly easy to delete or deactivate your account. Usually you can find a link to the page to kill your account toward the bottom of the main account settings page, though services often make it a small link and tuck it away in a corner in hopes that users will overlook it and stick around.
The one catch is that on some social networks you can’t completely delete your account—you can only deactivate it. Deactivating an account puts it into suspended animation, so to speak: Anything you posted will be taken offline, but the service will retain your account information in case you want to come back.
In the case of Facebook, you can readily deactivate your account, but if you want to delete it, you have to do some digging. Twitter gives a 30-day grace period after you deactivate your account before the service purges it, in case you change your mind; after those 30 days, though, Twitter will delete your account entirely. And Pinterest allows only deactivation—you have no option to delete the account.
If you’re ready to say good-bye to likes, retweets, pins, and pokes, here’s how to remove your account on five popular social media sites to the fullest extent possible.
