On January 8, Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account.
On Jan. 20, Twitter itself will have a presidential power transition, when Biden will use a new official Twitter account. But the nearly 90 million followers that Trump’s official presidential account @Potus has will not be transferred to Biden’s account, and the Biden team is super disappointed.
According to the plan announced by Twitter, Biden’s @POTUS account will not start with zero followers because the newly created @PresElectBiden will turn into the new @POTUS account, while the @Transition46 account will become the new White House account.
Others such as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ official Senate account will turn into the official Vice President account @VP, the newly created @FLOTUSBiden account will become the official account of the future First Lady, and the Biden team will get its first ever new account @SecondGentleman, which will be the official account of Kamala’s spouse.
Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director, expressed disappointment with Twitter’s plan to cut off the Biden team from followers of the existing official presidential account, calling it “absolutely, utterly unsatisfactory.
Flaherty stressed that Facebook is moving all of President Trump’s followers to the official POTUS account, Snapchat is handing them over to the @WhiteHouse account, and YouTube is handing over all of the existing president’s users to the current White House channel.
In response to a question about why the Biden team wanted Twitter followers, possibly Trump supporters, Flaherty explained on Twitter, “There are a lot of normal people who follow the president …… That’s why this account is a public service… …it’s not a political account, it’s the president’s account.” The Biden staffer then went on to say that the president-elect “really isn’t interested in Twitter followers …… but he does care about communicating with everyone in the country, whether they agree with him or not”.
Like it did with former President Barack Obama’s @POTUS account, Twitter said it would transfer Trump’s official account to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for archiving. Tweets from Trump’s @POTUS account will be archived under the deactivated @POTUS45 account.
During the Obama-to-Trump transition, the outgoing president’s staff insisted that the 13 million followers of Obama’s account should be transferred to Trump’s @POTUS account. It’s unclear why the same didn’t happen this time.
Twitter did not mention Trump’s personal account @realDonaldTrump, which was permanently banned last week and has not completed an official archive. Trump has used the account to make major policy statements throughout his presidency.
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