How to Make a Twitter Account Public

By Irene A. Blake

Twitter lets you instantly reverse the tweet protection privacy setting.
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All Twitter accounts start out as public accounts that allow anyone to search for and view your tweets on or off the website. You must manually change your Security and Privacy area settings to make the account private to block public viewing of your tweets. To make the account public again, you need to access the same area.

Pros and Cons of Private Accounts

When you make a Twitter account private, your past and future tweets on Twitter are hidden from everyone except for followers given approval to see them. The tweets are also hidden from Internet search engines. Past public tweets can still be found online if someone copied any of them to a different website. Your public profile page continue to exist as well, but only displays your profile thumbnail, profile image, username, bio, location and tweet stats. Your followers can read your tweets, but cannot retweet them. Additionally, tweeted replies to non-followers go unseen.

Revealing a Hidden Twitter Account

To make your hidden Twitter account public again, click the gear icon, select “Settings,” select “Security and Privacy,” deselect the “Protect My Tweets” option and then click “Save Changes.” Manually reversing your decision and changing to a public account from a private one makes all tweets publicly accessible and searchable again through Twitter and search engines. All restrictions are also removed. As a result, Twitter users can reply to and retweet your tweets at any time, as well as copy them to other websites.

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