On Thursday, November 2, the President’s Twitter account was deleted by a rogue employee at the company causing President Trump’s account to be down for over 11 minutes.
In a scramble that very night the account was eventually recovered and brought back. The initial thinking was that it might have been a mistake, but it was found that a contract employee on the last day of his job had caused the deletion. This made it even more difficult for the company who regularly relies on contract employees to fill in positions.
The President later tweeted out that day, “My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out- and having an impact.”
Twitter plans on increasing security and putting more scrutiny on its employees after the incident. In a tweet by Twitter’s government account on the 2nd of November, they conducted a full internal review.
According to The New York Times, often the deletion of accounts are “an easy two- or three-step process, according to current and former Twitter employees. Certain teams at the company — including trust and safety, and operations — have access to all accounts including the highest levels.”
However, “Twitter customer support does not have any access to the accounts of people, nor can they tweet on behalf of other users,” citing that there is very limited access to accounts according to The New York Times.
“I think it’s pretty funny how his account just disappeared like that, it’s almost as if your words have real-world consequences,” says Rico Rodolfo, Chabot Student. “He gets away with saying a lot of things online, but when it catches up to him, I think it’s hilarious.”
It remains unclear as to how the rogue employee was able to delete the president’s account.