Twitter said it will not transfer the followers from the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse Twitter accounts to President-elect Joe Biden when he assumes office, a reversal from 2017.
As a result, the Biden transition team created an account Thursday night, @PresElectBiden, which the team said will become the next @POTUS account after President Trump’s presidential Twitter feed is archived.
“Folks — This will be the account for my official duties as President,” the account tweeted. “At 12:01 PM on January 20th, it will become @POTUS. Until then, I’ll be using @JoeBiden.”
Folks — This will be the account for my official duties as President. At 12:01 PM on January 20th, it will become @POTUS. Until then, I’ll be using @JoeBiden. And while you’re here, follow @FLOTUSBiden @SenKamalaHarris @SecondGentleman and @Transition46.
— President-elect Biden (@PresElectBiden) January 15, 2021
Together, the two accounts have nearly 60 million followers, not accounting for considerable overlap. Twitter said that once Biden assumes control of the handles, it will reset both accounts’ followers to zero, according to Bloomberg.
“People on Twitter who previously followed institutional White House Twitter accounts, or who currently follow relevant Biden or Harris Twitter accounts, will receive in-app alerts and other prompts that will notify them about the archival process, as well as give them the option to follow the new administration’s Twitter accounts,” Twitter wrote in a blog post.
In 2017, Twitter transferred the 12 million followers garnered during former President Barack Obama’s tenure to Trump’s account, in addition to consolidating followers from a number of other accounts.
“They are advantaging President Trump’s first days of the administration over ours,” said Rob Flaherty, Biden transition digital director. “If we don’t end the day with the 12 million followers that Donald Trump inherited from Barack Obama, then they have given us less than they gave Donald Trump, and that is a failure.”
“There is value in being able to communicate with an audience that doesn’t agree with us,” Flaherty added.
Despite the large Twitter following on the official accounts, Trump preferred to tweet from his personal @realDonaldTrump account until Twitter permanently suspended his account for violating its policies on glorifying violence.
Twitter said that instead of preserving @POTUS’s current followers, it will transfer the followers from @PresElectBiden to @POTUS once Biden has control over the account. Biden’s @Transition46 account will take the @WhiteHouse handle.
In order to comply with the Presidential Records Act, all tweets from accounts connected to the president must be archived, as Obama’s Twitter feed was in 2017.
Twitter said that complying with the act and transferring followers to Biden presented a significant technical difficulty, even though other platforms said they’d be able to do exactly that.
Facebook and Instagram said they both will duplicate followers from presidential accounts and give them to Biden once he assumes office.
“We’re following the same procedures we used during the transfer between the Obama and Trump administration when President-elect Biden is sworn into office next week,” a spokesperson from Facebook said.
