After Trump's exit, what will happen to US government's official Twitter accounts?
Joe Biden and Donald Trump
With Donald Trump ending his presidency, and with Joe Biden taking over the White House, a lot of changes are anticipated - including in the how the administration's Twitter presence functions.
The official handles of US administration including president (@POTUS), first lady (@FLOTUS), and vice president (@VP) will be transferred to the incoming officials, with Twitter being in charge of this transfer. After Biden is sworn in later today, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Mike Pence will lose access to their accounts respectively which host tens of millions of followers.
What is Twitter doing?
In a statement, Twitter confirmed that it is "actively working with the US government to support the archival and transition of Twitter accounts across administrations".
The statement added that on January 20, Twitter will help in the transfer process - "As president-elect Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021, Twitter will facilitate the transfer of institutional White House Twitter accounts," the statement said.
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In addition, the transfer of power will happen in real-time - in sync with the inauguration's pace in DC.
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"People on Twitter will be able to watch the transition of power take place in real-time as accounts for the White House, President, Vice President, First Lady and White House Press Secretary inherit their new institutional usernames", the statement added.
In addition, people who follow @PresElectBiden will now officially become followers of @POTUS, and @SenKamalaHarris' followers will become @VP's followers.
Will old followers be retained?
But, the followers from the current account will not be retained. For instance - if anyone is following @POTUS at the moment, but not @PresElectBiden, they will be removed a follower of @POTUS.
Followers will get a notification about the change in leadership and then will have the option of following the new representatives.
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This is in stark opposition to the previous transitional phase, whereby Donald Trump retained the followers of @POTUS after taking over presidential duties from Barack Obama.
Besides this, a new account has been created for Doug Emhoff, who will the first Second Gentleman of the United States, it's called @SecondGentleman.
All tweets by Donald Trump on @POTUS handle will archived as @POTUS45.
"Tweets and account history will remain publicly available and the account usernames will be updated to reflect their archived status," Twitter said.
"Once this archival process is completed, Twitter will transfer the institutional accounts to the Biden administration to assume ownership", Twitter's statement added.