U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account went down
abruptly for about 11 minutes Thursday evening, a brief deactivation the
social media company blamed on an employee who was heading out the
door.
Attempts to
call up Trump’s personal page, @realDonaldTrump, turned up a message
saying, "Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!", prompting many Twitter users
to send out screenshots. Within minutes, the account was once again
available. The official feed for the U.S. president, @POTUS, wasn’t
affected.
“Through
our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter
customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We
are conducting a full internal review,” the
company
tweeted, after citing inadvertent “human error” in an earlier post.
Twitter has mistakenly frozen accounts in the past. In 2016,
Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey was locked out of his own for a few
minutes. Dorsey said in a tweet that the suspension was “
an internal mistake.” Users can also
deactivate
their own accounts. Once someone chooses to do so, Twitter retains that
data for 30 days, after which it begins the process of deleting the
information. An account can be reactivated during that period simply by
logging in.
Twitter
has come under fire from critics who say the company should banish Trump
for violating its terms of service. The U.S. president often uses
Twitter to disseminate his thinking, sometimes making disparaging
remarks. Twitter’s rules let the company suspend accounts for violent
threats, gender-based attacks and other forms of abuse and harassment.
In June, Trump tweeted remarks aimed at MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski: "I heard poorly rated
@Morning_Joe
speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy
Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row
around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding
badly from a face-lift. I said no!"
The next month, the U.S.
President posted a video in which he’s shown wrestling and punching a
person whose head bears the CNN logo. Many said that tweet violated
Twitter’s policies against violent threats and targeted abuse.
The
fact that Twitter hasn’t closed Trump’s account appears to be “a
violation of Twitter’s own rules," Stephen Balkam, the founder of the
Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit organization that’s part of
Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, said in a recent interview. "If an
ordinary citizen tweeted some of what he tweeted, I would think some of
them would be taken down."
Source: Bloomberg
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