It’s a Twitter user’s worst nightmare: wake up and find that most of your followers are gone.
But that’s exactly what will happen on Wednesday with the president’s official Twitter accounts. No, not @realDonaldTrump – he’s been banned forever. This is the destination that awaits lesser-known accounts, such as @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS and @VP. (POTUS is the official acronym for President of the United States; FLOTUS refers to the first lady.)
These institutional accounts do not belong to any particular individual – they are reserved for official government use by those in the current administration. Twitter will transfer them to President-elect Joe Biden as soon as he is officially installed on Wednesday. Less, that is, the majority of his followers.
This is different from the previous Twitter transition, when the official accounts of then President Barack Obama were transferred to President Donald Trump with intact followers. This time, these accounts could lose tens of millions of followers by order of Twitter. People abandoned by these accounts, in addition to those who follow “relevant Biden and Harris accounts”, such as @KamalaHarris, will receive notifications that they can follow them.
Biden’s current account – @PresElectBiden – will become @POTUS as soon as Biden himself becomes POTUS.
Biden’s team doesn’t seem happy about that. The President-elect’s digital director, Rob Flaherty, tweeted last week that the follower’s redefinition is “Absolutely, deeply insufficient”.
In Twitter’s view, the reset gives users the option of following or not following new accounts.
The company says it has not made a decision on whether to now adopt this approach during transfers of power. But spokesman Nick Pacilio said that is the policy in other countries.
What about Trump’s @POTUS account? It will be filed as @ POTUS45, just as the Obama administration account was filed as @ POTUS44.
However, this is not the case with @realdonaldtrump. Although it has been extensively archived by other platforms and researchers, it has disappeared from Twitter itself. This alone has raised criticism from academics and others who believe that it should also be part of the public record, easily searchable and accessible to anyone.
Meanwhile, Facebook follows its previous policy of “duplicating” all 11 million followers of the White House’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts for the new administration. Trump’s POTUS and related accounts, however, will be archived and Biden will receive a new one.