Discarded Twitter accounts destroy value by locking it inside of assets that aren't available for use. Aspiring entrepreneurs are often forced to utilize unintuitive suffixes in their Twitter accounts due to the shortage of brief and meaningful names. This creates branding problems for companies and harms the user experience for individuals, who sometimes erroneously assume that company and Twitter names will be the same. Twitter’s inactive accounts policy (https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-policy) contains an unfulfilled promise to “release all inactive usernames in bulk,” but the company hasn't made good on its pledge.

Image credit for the photo used in this petition: Joi Ito on Flickr