The President of the United States of America lost the crucial ability to Tweet for an 11 minute timespan on Thursday (Nov. 2), following the temporary deactivation of his Twitter account by a Twitter employee who was being let go by the company. The incident has raised questions about the safeguards in place for high-profile Twitter users:
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a deleted Twitter account. At least, so it appeared for 11 minutes Thursday evening, when visitors to President Trump's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, were informed that there was no such thing.
[...] Amid a presidency that has seemed, at times, to be conducted primarily in 140-character pieces, this was a seismic event — and what was left of Twitter erupted. It was a raucous, modern-day town-square gathering of the sort not seen since ... well, since five months ago, when Mr. Trump coined a new word in the middle of the night.
[...] The answer, revealed three hours later, was something straight out of "Office Space." After saying in an initial statement that the account had been "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee," Twitter announced that a rogue customer support worker had done it on his or her last day at the company.
Previously: Twitter Shadowbans Republican Frontrunner
Twitter Co-founder: I'm Sorry if We Made Trump's Presidency Possible
Similar submissions also came from martyb and Phoenix666.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday November 08 2017, @11:46AM (5 children)
So will they take some kind of legal action against the employee or was letting them go enough? Clearly it wasn't a mistake on the part of the "rogue customer support worker". There is a similar story in the submission queue at the moment about some person that decided it was a great idea to flip off the presidents motorcade (like they would even see her) and she was fired for that apparently. The person here wasn't fired for suspending the Trump from Twitter but did it after being let go, one would assume as some final fuck off to the company. Clearly he was just support since apparently he didn't have access to actually delete the account? Or perhaps Twitter just as everyone else never deletes anything anymore but just moves into into some state of suspended animation where it sits forever and ever as datapoints for future mining efforts.
But what is up with all these idiots that thing that they can do whatever they like and they think they'll be greeted as heroes for their actions? Somehow normal employee decency and loyalty just doesn't apply anymore when it gets in the way of their "feelings"? It's not like being a support worker is high up on the food chain but good luck getting another job -- so why did they let you go from Twitter? X, then on my way out I decided to just suspend the twitter account of POTUS just for shits and giggles ... ok .. thanks .. we'll call you.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 08 2017, @01:38PM
I could see one or both of the employees capitalizing on their incidents due to the national attention they received. If not the Twitter employee, I could see the cyclist getting a bunch of job offers (not sure if they would pay as well though). What the Twitter employee did was much worse from a potential employer's point of view.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @04:42PM
I'm surprised you didn't know this yet...
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:09PM
Juli Briskman should be ashamed of herself. She's not a hero. She's a hero because she was very rude. I like people who aren't very rude. My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday November 08 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)
A better question would be, if you have an employee with that kind of access, a reason to fire him, and go through with firing him- Why did you even give him an opportunity to do something like this?
(Score: 3, Funny) by jasassin on Thursday November 09 2017, @07:46AM
I looked into it more deeply, and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department he still gets a paycheck. So, we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A