As Kamala Harris makes history, Twitter creates a @SecondGentleman account

When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, the microblogging social network Twitter will create @SecondGentleman, an account for Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The story will be a way to mark the historic election of the very first female vice-president.

During the administrations of Donald Trump and Barack Obama, the official @SecondLady Twitter accounts were owned by Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, and Jill Biden, wife of then Vice President Joe Biden, respectively.

Next Wednesday, the @SecondLady account will officially switch to @SecondGentleman; and this is just one of the many changes that Twitter will make as it transitions the main White House social media accounts from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.

“As we did in 2017, Twitter is actively working with the US government to support the archiving and transition of Twitter accounts between administrations,” Twitter wrote in a blog post on January 14.

Other White House institutional Twitter accounts that will move under the control of the Biden administration include those of the White House (@WhiteHouse), the President (@POTUS), the Vice President (@VP), the First dame (@FLOTUS) and White House press officer (@PressSec).

Before giving the handles and their credentials to the Biden team, Twitter will first transfer institutional accounts from the current administration to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). There, each account’s tweets and histories will remain publicly accessible with their account usernames changed to reflect their archived status.

For example, the current Trump administration @POTUS account will be publicly archived as @ POTUS45.

Additionally, Twitter accounts currently used by senior Biden officials will move to their official institutional accounts.

For example, the President-elect’s team account, @ Transition46, will become @WhiteHouse; Joe Biden’s @PresElectBiden account will become @POTUS; Harris’ political account @SenKamalaHarris will change to @VP; Jill Biden’s current account @FLOTUSBiden will become @FLOTUS, as in First Lady of the United States; and President-elect Jen Psaki’s press secretary, who currently uses @PressSecPsaki, will become @PressSec.

Twitter users who have previously followed institutional White House Twitter accounts or who are currently following current Biden administration accounts will receive in-app alerts allowing them to follow the new administration’s accounts.

News of Twitter’s transition process follows an ongoing dispute between the president-elect and the microblogging platform over resetting the subscriber count of each institutional account.

When Trump took office in 2017, he was allowed to take over the @POTUS account with his 12 million subscribers amassed during Obama’s time. But now that it’s Biden’s turn to take over, Twitter has said it will reset the number of followers to zero instead of letting Biden have the account’s current 60 million subscribers.

“[Twitter is] putting the early days of President Trump’s administration at an advantage over ours, “Rob Flaherty, Biden’s future White House chief digital officer, told Bloomberg News.” They gave us less than they gave Donald Trump, and it is a failure. “

He added: “There is value in being able to communicate with an audience that does not agree with us.” Instead, the @POTUS account can simply gain the current 213,700 subscribers of @ PresElectBiden.

Joe Biden’s personal Twitter account @JoeBiden has over 23.9 million followers.