It’s a Twitter user’s worst nightmare: wake up and find most of your followers gone.
But that’s exactly what will happen to the official presidential accounts on Twitter on Wednesday. No, not @realDonaldTrump – he’s been banned for life. This is the lot 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 individual – they are reserved for official government use by those in the current administration. Twitter will hand them over to President-elect Joe Biden once he is officially inaugurated on Wednesday. Minus, that is, most of their followers.
That’s in contrast to the previous Twitter transition, when then President Barack Obama’s official accounts were turned over to President Donald Trump with followers intact. This time, these accounts are losing tens of millions of followers on dictation from Twitter. People who have fallen through these accounts will be notified that they can follow them in addition to those following “relevant Biden and Harris accounts” such as @KamalaHarris.
Biden’s current account – @PresElectBiden – will turn into @POTUS once Biden becomes POTUS herself.
Biden’s team doesn’t seem happy about this. President-elect’s digital director, Rob Flaherty, tweeted last week that the followers’ reset is’ Absolutely, profoundly insufficient ‘.
According to Twitter, the reset gives users the choice of whether or not to follow the new accounts.
The company says it has not yet made a decision whether it will now also follow this approach for power transfers. But spokesman Nick Pacilio said it is the policy in other countries.
As for Trump’s @POTUS account? It will be filed as @ POTUS45, just as the Obama administration account was filed as @ POTUS44.
However, that’s not the case for @realdonaldtrump. While it has been extensively archived by other platforms and researchers, it has disappeared from Twitter itself. That alone has drawn criticism from academics and others who believe that it should also be part of the public register, be easily searchable and accessible to all.
Facebook, meanwhile, is sticking to its previous policy of “duplicating” all 11 million followers of the official White House Facebook and Instagram accounts to the new administration. Trump’s POTUS and related accounts, meanwhile, are being archived and Biden is getting a new one.