Twitter to wipe Trump followers before handover | Hacker News Reader

Twitter to wipe Trump followers before handover

bbc.com

32 pointsDarkContinent13 comments

Interesting, I'm curious why a wipe of followers of a government office twitter account. Does twitter do that for other similar official accounts?

Yeah, when Obama was elected, @POTUS was renamed to @POTUS44 to give @POTUS to the new president (however Trump stuck to his personal account).

I'm not sure how long that system had been in place though.

I think the tweets were archived to @POTUS44 but the followers remained.

You are right, I remember another subtlety: if you followed @POTUS you were made to follow both @POTUS44 and @POTUS.

> Yeah, when Obama was elected, @POTUS was renamed to @POTUS44 to give @POTUS to the new president

@POTUS was archived to @POTUS44, but the followers remained with @POTUS (well, both accounts, actually.) This transition Twitter has declared they will archive @POTUS and other White House accounts and reset followers to 0, instead of retaining followers tas was done at the last transition.

> I'm not sure how long that system had been in place though.

@POTUS was launched May 18, 2015, so it's not like there was a prior transition to have set precedent.

are all the variations of @POTUSXX reserved, or does a squatter get their account yanked every 4-8 years?

Twitter has historically yanked usernames. An unofficial perk of being an employee, I've been told, is being able to yank a disused username for yourself. I know a few folks who have done it.

What are the benefits to passing around an account like this? Doesn't this break old tweets after the transition?

Interestingly, no. The username part of every tweet url is ignored.

Per the CNN article

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/22/politics/biden-twitter-wh...

“Twitter will notify followers of these accounts to provide context that the content will be archived and allow them the choice to follow the Biden administration's new accounts," Pacilio said. "For example, people who follow @WhiteHouse will be notified that the account has been archived as @WhiteHouse45 and given the option to follow the new @WhiteHouse account."

Honestly IMO it would be better if they kept followers, it might show some die hard red hat followers to see the other side of the political spectrum (although I have little hope nowadays that it would change minds). Then I realize it would mean a lot of people being very pissed off at Twitter, then I realized why Twitter is doing it... Gotta keep those ad-viewing engagement agents (aka users) happy!

The "die hard red hat followers" are expecting a media blackout, so the Twitter wipe will only reinforce their views of the political spectrum.

I think if I were Biden, I'd tell them if they want to wipe the account followers, just go ahead and delete all the accounts as well. I'm not going to expend effort to rebuild followers. We will stick with other methods of communication.

Twitter would about-face so hard Dorsey's gross beard would fly off his face.

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