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posted by n1 on Wednesday November 08 2017, @08:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the sad! dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:31PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:31PM (#594159)

    So far, we have yet to catch Twitter editing posts or posting on behalf of users. (we did catch reddit doing that)

    Twitter does selectively censor right/conservative/republican opinions and the people who spread those ideas.

    A major method is to hide posts for a few weeks. Conservative user X, with a small audience, posts something. Unimportant users can see it immediately. Conservative user Y, with a huge audience, won't see the post for several weeks. It won't be offered, and if they specifically seek it out they will get an unhelpful generic message like "This tweet is unavailable.". Twitter's intent is obviously to tamp down the fire of opinion, preventing the spread of opinions that offend Twitter's San Francisco employees.

    People also lose accounts, get forced to delete tweets, etc.

    Particularly troubling aspects of the censorship is that it is mostly hidden, yet right/conservative/republican users are aware of it. This causes self-censorship and makes all complaints sound like paranoid unjustified conspiracy theories.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @07:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @07:46PM (#594220)

    Lol, this guy thinks Twitter employees are running the show!

    How about we simply move on to decentralized systems, this idea of letting some corporation control what information you get is terrible! All the social networks are tracking and controlling what their users see. The only way out is to decentralize.