On Wednesday, as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. completes his transition to the White House, several social media companies will be completing their own highly followed official account transitions.
But the transfer will not be as perfect as it was four years ago, when President Barack Obama handed over the keys to much of his social empire to President Trump.
In 2017, President Obama passed the official Twitter accounts to President Trump, along with the millions of followers the accounts had gathered. Since then, President Trump’s digital team has used accounts as megaphones for the government’s agenda and has increased the number of followers: @POTUS has 33.3 million followers, @WhiteHouse has 26 million, @FLOTUS has 16.4 million and @VP has 10.3 million. The @POTUS account alone almost tripled in followers under Trump’s command.
But this year, instead of simply handing them over as it did before, Twitter will not transport the followers of each account while Biden takes over. Instead, accounts with much smaller followers, most created last week, will be made official.
The transitions mean that the digital Biden operation will, in large part, have to build new followers from scratch, instead of getting an early edge from its predecessor, as President Trump had. Twitter said it would alert users to new accounts.
“People on Twitter who previously followed institutional White House Twitter accounts, or who currently follow relevant Twitter accounts from Biden or Harris, will receive in-app alerts and other requests that will notify them of the archiving process, as well as give them the option to follow the new administration’s Twitter accounts, ”said Twitter in a blog post.
@PresElectBiden, an account that only posted once and has less than a million followers, will become @POTUS, taking as many followers as it has on Wednesday afternoon.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will bring 5.3 million followers from her own account @SenKamalaHarris for @VP.
The tweets in each checking account will be filed under different names. Trump administration tweets on @POTUS, for example, will be transferred to @ POTUS45.
Mr. Trump regularly used Twitter to make policy announcements and fire some of the people who worked for him, attracting new followers by the millions, even while spreading misinformation about the voting process and election security
The National Archives will preserve all of Mr. Trump’s social media activities, including deleted tweets from @POTUS and his personal account, @realDonaldTrump. The personal account, which the president used as an unfiltered platform for announcements of policies, complaints and fleeting thoughts that often had significant global ramifications, remains inaccessible after he was suspended for causing violence.
Mr. Biden can also continue to tweet on his personal account, @Joe Biden, which has 24.3 million followers.
Rob Flaherty, who will be the director of digital strategy in the Biden government, told Bloomberg News last week that Twitter’s failure to ignore followers of official accounts was unfair.
Presidential inauguration ›
Answers to your questions about the inauguration day:
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will become President of the United States at noon on January 20, in a reduced inauguration ceremony. While the key elements will remain traditional, many events will be reduced and “reimagined” to better adapt the celebration to a nation that is fighting the coronavirus. Mr. Biden will be sworn in by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on the West Front of the Capitol just before noon. The new president is then expected to make his inaugural speech and review the military troops, as is tradition. But instead of a traditional parade in front of spectators cheering along Pennsylvania Avenue as the new president, vice president and their families head to the White House more than a kilometer away, there will be an official escort with representatives from all over the world. branches of the armed forces for a block.
President Trump announced on Friday that he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. Mr. Biden called this decision “one of the few things he and I have already agreed to. Still, it is a major break with tradition for a president to skip the ceremonial heart of the country’s democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.
George W. Bush confirmed that he will travel to Washington for the inauguration day, along with Laura Bush, the former first lady. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are also expected to attend, along with former first ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, tickets are not available to the public. Planners are asking people to stay at home and attend virtual inaugural events to avoid large crowds that could easily spread the coronavirus. The events will be broadcast live by the Inaugural Presidential Committee and The New York Times.
The 20th Amendment to the Constitution requires that the term of office for each elected president and vice president begins at noon, January 20 of the year after the election. Every president has taken an oath of office and cannot take office without doing so. Symbolically, it marks the peaceful transfer of power from the current president to the next. The inauguration day will be even more important this year, as Biden ascends to the presidency at a time when the political division threatened the country’s democratic institutions and his predecessor did everything to remain in power.
“They are favoring the first days of President Trump’s rule over ours,” he said. “If we don’t end the day with the 12 million followers that Donald Trump inherited from Barack Obama, they gave us less than they gave Donald Trump, and that is a failure.”
On Twitter, Flaherty called the account “public good, ” writing down that followers include “a lot of breeding bots and trolls, but also a lot of people who are not really involved in politics”.
The transition will be less complicated on other social networks.
On Facebook, White House account followers will be transferred to Biden, said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. The seven million followers of Joe Biden’s account will be duplicated on the POTUS page, which has 6.5 million followers and has not been used since May 2018.
Trump’s White House account will be renamed so it can be archived, McAlister said.
The same procedure will happen on Instagram, where the White House account has 6.8 million followers. The Joe Biden account has 15.4 million followers on Instagram.
A YouTube spokeswoman said 1.87 million subscribers to the White House channel would be passed on to the Biden government.
Snapchat will transfer the “whitehouse” account, along with its 803,000 subscribers, to President Biden at 12:01 pm on Wednesday, a spokesman for Snap said.
This means that on those sites, users who signed up to follow the news from the Trump administration will soon see the news from Biden, something Flaherty said he was looking forward to.
“It is important to be able to communicate with an audience that does not agree with us,” he told Bloomberg News.