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Rogue Twitter Employee Briefly Shuts Down Trump's Account

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

takyon writes:

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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 08 2017, @11:57PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 08 2017, @11:57PM (#594313) Journal

    The amount of bitching and moaning about a downtime of 11 minutes is just staggering.

    So why are you hyperventilating about this, if it is so meaningless? I see it as a learning opportunity, nothing more about operational security and the state of the press. Even little slip ups like this can have high visibility in the fickle press when there's a slow news day and journalists need to fill page or talk up a popular cliche (like people dissing/protesting Trump).

    I would be much less angry if there wasn't such hypocrisy about corporate censorship, and that hypocrisy goes for all the liberal commenters saying Twitter can do what it wants since it is a private organization. We all get defensive about our own ideologies and fellow community members, but try to rise above and hold the same "moral" standards no matter who is being persecuted.

    That's reasonable. One of the best arguments against hypocrisy concerning censorship and other silly games of suppressing contrary opinion, is that the tool that is so useful for you today will eventually fall into the hands of some inimical party and then get used against you. Meanwhile fair treatment for everyone can't be used against you, right?