Whether we like it or not, for the next few years America is going to be governed from Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The social-media platform is clearly very important to Trump, who has insisted on keeping his private-citizen Twitter account even after being given the passwords to the official @POTUS, @FLOTUS and @VP accounts. (The Obamas’ and Biden’s tweets have been archived under @POTUS44, @FLOTUS44, and @VP44.) One can only hope that “Diamond Joe” changed the latter’s password to “DokkenRules” before departing.
As Trump was being sworn in to office yesterday, a transition of power was taking place online as well; Obama’s @POTUS Twitter followers were supposed to migrate over to his new @POTUS44 account, while keeping those same people as followers of Trump’s @POTUS account as well. But then something odd happened: Scores of people who never followed the @POTUS account in the first place began reporting that they had been automatically signed up to follow Trump’s 3:30 a.m. rage-tweets. Some who had specifically unfollowed or even blocked the @POTUS account reported being signed up to follow Trump:
Users also reported being automatically signed up to follow the @FLOTUS and @VP accounts as well, although they didn’t seem quite as pissed off about that. For its part, Twitter is blaming the whole thing on a tech glitch, and says it’s looking into what happened and the script for migrating the accounts was “taking some time” to go into effect. Sounds like it’s going to be a glitchy four years.
[via BuzzFeed News, Tech Crunch]