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It’s a Twitter user’s worst nightmare: wake up to find most of your followers gone.
But that’s exactly what will happen on the official presidential Twitter accounts on Wednesday. No, not @realDonaldTrump – he’s already been banned for life. That’s the fate that awaits lesser-known accounts like @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS, and @VP. (POTUS is the official acronym for President of the United States; FLOTUS refers to the First Lady.)
These institutional accounts do not belong to any particular person – they are for official government use by those in the current administration. Twitter will transfer them to President-elect Joe Biden once he officially opens on Wednesday. Less, that is, most of their followers.
It’s different from the previous transition on Twitter, when then-President Barack Obama’s official accounts were transferred to President Donald Trump with subscribers intact. This time around, those accounts risk losing tens of millions of followers to Twitter’s dictation. People abandoned by these accounts, in addition to those following “relevant Biden and Harris accounts” such as @KamalaHarris, will receive notifications that they can follow them.
Biden’s current account – @PresElectBiden – will change to @POTUS once Biden himself becomes POTUS.
Biden’s team don’t seem happy with this. President-elect Rob Flaherty’s digital director tweeted last week that the follower reset is “Absolutely, deeply insufficient.”
In Twitter’s view, the reset gives users the choice of whether or not to follow new accounts.
The company says it has not made a decision on whether it intends to take this approach from now on during power transfers. But spokesman Nick Pacilio said it was the policy in other countries.
As for Trump’s @POTUS account? It will be archived as @ POTUS45, just as the Obama administration account was archived as @ POTUS44.
This is not the case for @realdonaldtrump, however. Although it has been widely archived by other platforms and researchers, it has disappeared from Twitter itself. That alone has drawn criticism from academics and others who believe it should also be part of the public record, easily searchable and accessible to all.
Facebook, meanwhile, is sticking to its previous policy of “duplication” of the 11 million followers of the official White House Facebook and Instagram accounts into the new administration. Trump’s POTUS and associated accounts, meanwhile, will be archived and Biden will get a new one.
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