Twitter will reset the White House & POTUS accounts with zero followers on Jan. 20

I’m looking forward to so many things and events in 2021. The inauguration, seeing Donald Trump dragged out of the White House, the ensuing avalanche of state and federal investigations and charges against Trump and his minions, not to mention all of the civil lawsuits. I’m also looking forward to Twitter cracking down on Trump and his minions too. It’s been building for a while, as Jack Dorsey has – over the past year – tried to make Twitter a more hostile place for Nazis. But Twitter has special rules for Donald Trump, rules which will disappear on January 20th. As it turns out, Twitter is also going to completely reset the @WhiteHouse and @POTUS accounts on that date too.

Donald Trump will lose access to Twitter’s official White House accounts — including @POTUS and @WhiteHouse — when Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20 as the 46th president of the United States. But with the changeover, the Biden team will be rebuilding the followers of those accounts from scratch. On Inauguration Day, Twitter will reset @POTUS, @WhiteHouse and other accounts to zero followers and issue prompts to users to re-follow the new Biden-controlled accounts if they choose. The existing posts from the Trump administration will be archived on new accounts (e.g., @POTUS45 and @WhiteHouse45) maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The White House accounts “will not automatically retain their existing followers,” a Twitter rep said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead, Twitter will notify followers of these accounts to provide context that the content will be archived and allow them the choice to follow the Biden administration’s new accounts.”

That’s a change from what happened when Trump took over the White House four years ago. In 2016, “the Trump admin absorbed all of President Obama’s Twitter followers on @POTUS and @WhiteHouse — at Team 44’s urging,” Rob Flaherty, the Biden campaign’s digital director, tweeted Tuesday. “In 2020, Twitter has informed us that as of right now the Biden administration will have to start from zero.”

Currently, @POTUS has 33.2 million followers on Twitter and @WhiteHouse has 26 million. Other presidential accounts that will be moving to the Biden team include @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @Cabinet and @LaCasaBlanca.

Meanwhile, as previously reported, after Trump leaves office he will lose the special exemption that Twitter extends to political leaders under which the social network flags (but does not remove) posts that would be considered policy violations for regular users.

“If an account [holder] suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at a Senate hearing last month.

That will extend to Trump’s personal @realDonaldTrump account, which now has 88.5 million followers. Since Election Day, Trump and his supporters have made various inaccurate claims that Trump somehow won the election and that there was widespread voter fraud or other voting snafus that would have changed the results — without any credible supporting evidence. Twitter has flagged hundreds of tweets and retweets by Trump as disputed or misleading.

[From Variety]

Personally, I never felt that terrorized by the Trump administration’s use of the POTUS or White House Twitter accounts, but perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention. It seemed like Trump used his own account as a specialized, dedicated account for all of his most insane rants, fascistic thoughts and authoritarian dreams. And once he starts ranting, lying and inciting violence on January 20th, I trust that Dorsey will pull the plug. As for the official POTUS and White House accounts… I will follow them during the Biden administration. They better make it boring as hell. Won’t that be glorious? To follow some government accounts which are sane and mundane?

Also: originally, the story was that the Trump White House refused to allow the incoming Biden administration to retain the followers the Trumpers had for the official WH and POTUS accounts. But it sounds like it’s Twitter’s call, not Trump’s? I mean, I completely believe that Trump and his people are that f–king petty. But I also think Twitter is trying to draw a line between the Trump era and Biden era.

PS… Trump hasn’t been seen in public since December 13th?!? And that was only for a golf outing. Hm.

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Embed from Getty Images

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Getty.

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