Twitter Reveals @realDonaldTrump Account Was Deliberately Taken Down by an Exiting Employee
The personal Twitter account of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, was deliberately taken down by an employee before leaving Twitter, the social media company confirmed recently.
On Friday night, many Twitter users were shocked (while some rejoiced) when they discovered that Trump's official and personal social media account with handle @realDonaldTrump became unsearchable.
This could only mean that the account Trump used frequently had been removed from cyberspace. However, as expected, the incident did not last very long and the said Twitter page was back up within less than an hour.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
In a series of social media posts on Friday night, Twitter explained that the @realDonaldTrump account had indeed been taken down for a short amount of time. The company explained that it was "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee."
Twitter added that they were able to restore Trump's Twitter page after 11 minutes and that they have started investigating the incident.
A couple of hours later, the Twitter Government account updated their report and revealed: "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."
While many Twitter users applauded the actions of the anonymous ex-Twitter employee, the company maintained that they were taking the incident seriously and said they have installed additional security measures to prevent it from happening again.
"We won't be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it," Twitter added.
According to a BuzzFeed report, a former senior Twitter employee confirmed that many people in the company have access to suspend an account. However, that is different from deactivating a page - just like what happened to @realDonaldTrump - and only a few people have the ability to do it.
Meanwhile, many netizens and personalities reacted to the news by jokingly suggesting that the ex-Twitter employee needed to be rewarded or be given a pay raise. On the other hand, Trump supporters call it an attack to freedom of speech.
