A Twitter employee deleted US President Donald Trump’s account on what was his last day at the social media company.
Talk about leaving in style.
Trump’s now infamous @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated the employee who was leaving the company on Thursday, resulting in the account being down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said.
Twitter initially sent out a tweet saying:
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee.
The account was down for 11 minutes and has since been restored.
We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
A tweet later on then confirmed:
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.
We are conducting a full internal review.
During the 11 minutes, which were shortly before 4pm (11pm GMT), anyone trying to access Trump’s Twitter page were met with the infamous blue background, along with the message:
Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!
Despite Twitter’s show of remorse, plenty of people were calling for the company to give the employee a ‘raise’, calling them a ‘national hero’ and explaining it had been the ‘best 11 minutes’ of the year:
Trump, who joined Twitter in March 2009, has 41.7 million followers and has tweeted more than 36,000 times.
He made no mention of the incident on his Twitter account, instead choosing to tweet about ‘James Comey’s leadership’ being ‘a disaster’ and telling people he was going to be interviewed on Fox News.
There have been calls for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account, especially as he continually causes alarm when making threats to North Korea.
In September Twitter refused to take down one of his threatening North Korea tweets, suggesting the statement Trump had made was both ‘newsworthy’ and in the public interest.
In a thread, they wrote:
Some of you have been asking why we haven’t taken down the Tweet.
We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules.
Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest.
This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will.
Twitter is committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what’s happening in the world.
We’ll continue to be guided by these fundamental principles.
This didn’t go down too well with people who said Twitter needed to ‘check their policies’ again.
One user, Kevin Gray said:
Hi. Can you check your own companies policies again? He violates them daily. You guys probably have a lawyer around there if needed.
Rita Hunter echoed the sentiment, tweeting:
I do not believe you hold Trump to the same rules. He is a name calling bully at best. Not what twitter should allow.
And Judith Fardig added:
Really hope you will revoke Trump’s twitter account. He is endangering the world with nuclear war threats. What could be worse?
Looks like he’s still on the site for now.
