Twitter has said that a bug has now been corrected that led about 560,000 to accidentally follow @POTUS, the Twitter account associated with the presidency and which is now being used by Donald Trump`s team. It is being run in conjunction with his personal handle, and has so far mostly posted updates on his coming to power.
In the handover, people who never asked to follow Mr Trump`s new account – or had explicitly unfollowed it – found themselves doing so and receiving those tweets.
The bug appears to be a consequence of the way that the Twitter account was transferred from Barack Obama`s team to Donald Trump`s. When Mr Obama left office, all of his tweets were moved to a new account called @POTUS44; everyone who followed the presidential account were automatically moved to Mr Trump`s one, which had the same handle.
But that move doesn`t appear to have happened smoothly, meaning that various people ended up following the @POTUS account after Mr Trump assumed control of it.
"Two issues were reported during the day which we spent the night confirming and have now corrected," Jack Dorsey, Twitter`s CEO, posted.
He wrote that people who had followed the new Obama account found themselves being set to follow the @POTUS account as well, and with it Mr Trump`s team. Some people had also asked to unfollow the @POTUS account but were "mistakenly marked to now follow @POTUS", according to Mr Dorsey,
He said that the problem had affected "about 560,000 people". "This was a mistake, it wasn`t right, we own it, and we apologize," he wrote. "No excuses."
Twitter`s role in the election and the continuing promotion of Donald Trump has been much discussed both inside and outside the company. Some have even suggested that it should have banned his personal account in keeping with his guidelines, and even many Trump supporters have suggested that he should stop using it so much.
It may even be the case that his tweets are breaching an Act of Congress, since he is deleting and not obviously archiving them.
/The Independent/
Twitter bug leads people to follow Donald Trump
23 January 2017
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Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves following Donald Trump`s presidential Twitter account without ever having asked to.
