How can I get Twitter to delete my account?

Question

I want to delete my old (7 years unused, never logged in) Twitter account. I lost the email to it, but it has my name so I would like to delete it. I wrote Twitter support twice and told them "This is my old account it's obviously inactive as you can see. I lost the email for the account, but please delete it.". I even attached a scan of my passport to prove that it is me. But after 2 requests they still refuse to delete it. In the second request I send them following: https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/right-to-be-forgotten/ which in my understanding means they have to comply with my request.

Their response is we can not delete an account without you owning the original email. But I lost the email and the account has my first and second name and is inactive which excludes some kind of troll request.

Now my jurisdiction is Switzerland, which as far as I understand does not have GDPR, but I presume Switzerland has something equivalent to GDPR. How can I get Twitter to delete my account?

Answer 1

You probably cannot force twitter to delete your account. Art. 16(6) contains:

6. Without prejudice to Article 11, where the controller has reasonable doubts concerning the identity of the natural person making the request referred to in Articles 15 to 21, the controller may request the provision of additional information necessary to confirm the identity of the data subject.

However, this does not mean you need to identify yourself (using a scan of your passport) just for the purpose of your removal request based on Art. 17. Instead, you need to show that you are the same person who created the account, and not someone with the same name. The easiest way to identify yourself is using your login name and password. Otherwise you have control over the email address linked to the account is fine too. As you seem not to be able to do any of those, I cannot think of any other way to show that you are the person who created the account.