Twitter is Giving Joe Biden The @POTUS Account in January
(Photo by Joe Raedle via Getty Images)
Twitter is Giving Joe Biden The @POTUS Account in January
The social media company is transferring five accounts associated with the presidency to Biden's incoming administration regardless of whether Trump ever concedes.
Donald Trump will soon have four fewer Twitter accounts to flood with petulance and misinformation.
According to a Politico report, the social media company has confirmed @POTUS and all government accounts associated with the presidency will be automatically transferred to Joe Biden and his administration when the president-elect is inaugurated into office at noon on January 21st, 2021 (regardless of whether Trump has conceded the election by then.) In addition to @POTUS, Biden's team will secure control of @VP, @FLOTUS, @WhiteHouse, and @PressSec, on Inauguration Day.
"Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021," a rep for the company. They went on to note the National Archives and Records Administration's was consulting the process. All tweets from those accounts will be archived under new handles on Twitter (@POTUS45, @VP45, etc.)
Trump will still have his personal account to harp on, which has a concerningly high following (90ish million to 30ish million.) But that account will lose all exemptions from content and conduct policies in place for political figures, allowing the company to flag and remove any tweets violating those guidelines. "If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away," said Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, at a Senate hearing this week.
Facebook, on the other hand, changed their tune on flagging and fact-checking the president's posts earlier this year. In the same Senate hearing, the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed "If the president or anyone else is spreading hate speech or inciting violence or posting content that delegitimizes the election, those will receive the same treatment as anyone else saying those things, and that will continue to be the case."
