President Trump’s tweets, which have raised the ire of many a journalist, disappeared yesterday when a customer service employee deactivated the account on his last day of work.
Twitter was not pleased.
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump [1]’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017 [2]
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. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF [3]
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017 [4]
There were a lot of reactions on Twitter about the missing account, including this one from Meghan McCain, who is no fan of the president.
https://t.co/5AQmhpXgq6 [5] pic.twitter.com/pMsZzyX8pG [6]
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) November 3, 2017 [7]
Trump didn’t respond to his account being down until this morning.
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.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017 [8]
This is another black eye for Twitter, which, like other social media platforms, has struggled with accusations of being biased in their policies and practices.