Despite Twitter's claims that the famous @realdonaldtrump account of U.S. President Donald Trump was “inadvertently deactivated” due to human error, downing the profile for 11 minutes before it was restored, it turns out the account was actually deleted on purpose by a Twitter employee on his last day working for the social media company.
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The account was pulled right after the U.S. president tweeted a video announcing the next Federal Reserve chairman.
Visitors to the normally-raucous account were greeted with a blue screen bearing the message: "Sorry, that page doesn't exist."
“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the company said in an initial tweet.
Twitter's official @TwitterGov account announced that it was, in fact, not an error that led to the account's brief disappearance.
“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,” Twitter said in a tweet.
“Great Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!” the U.S. leader wrote in his first tweet after Thursday’s outage.
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Trump has made extensive use of messages on Twitter to attack his opponents and promote his policies both during the 2016 presidential campaign and since taking office in January. He has 41.7 million followers on Twitter.
While critics have blasted Trump's habit of addressing important and trivial issues alike through the social network as unbecoming of a commander-in-chief, Trump has defended the practice as “not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.”
During his election campaign, Trump bragged that he is considered the “Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters,” adding that if one of his detractors says something bad about him, “bing bing bing — I say something really bad about them.”
In a similar incident last November, Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey’s account was briefly suspended as a result of what he said was an internal mistake.
A Twitter representative has declined to comment further on the deletion.