When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, the microblogging social network Twitter will create @SecondGentleman, an account for Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The report will be a way to mark the historic election of the first female vice president.
During the Donald Trump and Barack Obama administrations, the official Twitter accounts @SecondLady belonged to Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, and Jill Biden, wife of then Vice President Joe Biden, respectively.
Next Wednesday, the @SecondLady account will officially change to @SecondGentleman; and it’s just one of several changes that Twitter will make in the transition from major White House social media accounts from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.
Olivier Douliery / AFP
“As we did in 2017, Twitter is actively working with the United States government to support the archiving and transition of Twitter accounts between administrations,” wrote Twitter in a January 14 blog post.
The other institutional Twitter accounts of the White House that will be transferred to the control of the Biden government include those of the White House (@WhiteHouse), President (@POTUS), Vice President (@VP), First Lady (@FLOTUS) and the Branco Chamber Press Secretary (@PressSec).
Before giving the identifiers and their logins to the Biden team, Twitter will first transfer the institutional accounts of the current administration to the National Administration of Archives and Records (NARA). There, tweets and histories for each account will remain publicly available with their account usernames changed to reflect their archived status.
For example, the current Trump administration @POTUS account will be publicly archived as @ POTUS45.
In addition, the Twitter accounts currently in use by Biden’s top employees will be transferred to their official institutional accounts.
For example, the president-elect team account, @ Transition46, will become @WhiteHouse; Joe Biden’s @PresElectBiden account will become @POTUS; Harris’ political account, @SenKamalaHarris, will become @VP; Jill Biden’s @FLOTUSBiden checking account will become @FLOTUS, as in the United States First Lady; and President-elect Jen Psaki’s press secretary, who currently uses @PressSecPsaki, will become @PressSec.
Twitter users who previously followed the White House’s institutional Twitter accounts or who currently follow the current accounts of the Biden administration, will receive alerts in the app allowing them to follow the accounts of the new administration.
News of the Twitter transition process follows an ongoing dispute between the president-elect and the microblogging platform over the reset of the follower count for each institutional account.
When Trump took office in 2017, he was allowed to take over the @POTUS account with his 12 million followers accumulated during the Obama era. But now that it is Biden’s turn to take over, Twitter has said it will reset the follower count instead of allowing Biden to have the current 60 million account followers.
“[Twitter is] favoring President Trump’s early days of administration over ours, “Rob Flaherty, the future director of digital strategy at the Biden White House, told Bloomberg News.” They gave us less than they gave Donald Trump, and that is a failure. “
He added: “It is important to be able to communicate with an audience that does not agree with us.” Instead, the @POTUS account can simply gain the current 213,700 followers of @ PresElectBiden.
Joe Biden’s personal Twitter account, @JoeBiden, has more than 23.9 million followers.