560,000 Twitter users found themselves following Trump’s official Presidential handle, including many that had blocked, unfollowed or never followed it
Many Twitter users found themselves following the @POTUS handle, despite blocking it in advance
560,000 people were almost forced to endure Donald Trump’s unrelenting impulse-tweets against their will.
The mistake happened January 20, when Twitter was in the process of switching the official @POTUS account from former President Barack Obama, to newly inaugurated President Trump. When random users that had never before followed the @POTUS account began to find their accounts doing just that, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped in to explain the error and apologise.
In a series of tweets the CEO described how he and his team planned to carry out the peaceful transition of tweeting power from Obama to Trump, and failed.
“The Obama Administration worked with all their platforms to craft a transition plan. Because @POTUS is an institutional account (not personal) they felt it only fair to transition accounts with followers intact, but 0 tweets. We kicked off that plan at 12pm Eastern yesterday. If you were following @POTUS before 12pm ET, by end of day you’d be following *two* accounts: @POTUS44 (44th Admin) and @POTUS (45th Admin).”
The idea was for Obama’s tweets to be preserved at @POTUS44, with no association to what we can only imagine will become a stream of presidential consciousnesses emanating from Trump’s newly appointed @POTUS account.
In reality, many users found themselves following both @POTUS44 (Obama Admin) and @POTUS (Trump Admin) after the designated time change. Even worse, many people that had unfollowed or blocked the official presidential handle – whether some time ago or, one can imagine in purposeful preparation for this transition of power – found themselves following it again.
Twitter estimates the issue impacted 560,000 people, but it’s unclear whether that relates to only the forced follows, or those following @POTUS44 as well. In addition to being forced, albeit briefly, to follow Trump, the @VP, @WhiteHouse, and @PressSec handles were also impacted.
“This was a mistake, it wasn’t right, we own it, and we apologize. No excuses… We believe we’ve corrected all accounts to reflect your follow/unfollow intent. We’re sorry for the mistakes made here, and thank you all.”
There are some outlying anomalies that are not satisfactorily explained by Dorsey, however. A number of people took to Twitter to complain that they had never followed the @POTUS accounts, and other official White House accounts, yet found themselves doing just that.
@sarahintampa I can confirm that I had never followed POTUS, FLOTUS or VP but was forced to Follow all three.
— Jimi Kunkel (@JimiKunkel) January 21, 2017
@stephanie0324 @jack @POTUS I saw a few people say they never even followed Obama and they were automatically following Trump yesterday
— kaitlyn michelle. (@asdfjklkaitlyn) January 22, 2017
@jack Except I had never followed the POTUS or FLOTUS accounts and yet was yesterday. 🤔
— Major Paul (@anunlikelybrit) January 22, 2017