On Friday, Twitter planned a massive undertaking: The transition of the @POTUS account from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, and the migration of those @POTUS followers from one account to another. Each of these accounts—@POTUS, @FLOTUS, @VP, etc.—had millions of followers. With an account transition of that scale, naturally, there were some bugs.
Roughly 560,000 people were not happy to discover that instead of following @POTUS44, the archival account of Obama’s presidential tweets, they were still following @POTUS, now manned by Donald Trump. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for the error, which no doubt was very stressful for some.
All: we investigated what happened here, and we made some mistakes (which have been corrected). Some context first. https://t.co/W1n3Xs6LaN
— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017
Apparently, some Twitter users who wanted to follow @POTUS44 after 12pm EST on Friday discovered they were actually following @POTUS. Others who had unfollowed @POTUS ahead of the new administration’s takeover suddenly saw they were still following the account. Yet others, who claimed they had never followed @POTUS to begin with, found themselves following the account (although in this case, it is difficult to know whether it was a true bug or whether they had followed the account at some point in the past).
Dorsey said these issues also affected other official accounts such as @WhiteHouse and @PressSec, but the problems should all be resolved now.
Still, if you don’t want any Trumpian musings disturbing your delicately curated Twitter feed, it is best to visit @POTUS to double check to make sure you are not following the account.
H/T Gizmodo
