An employee at far left social media giant media briefly deactivated President Trump's Twitter account on Thursday, sparking outrage all across the platform.
Twitter wasn't immediately able to figure out how or why the account was shut down. Initially Twitter made a statement that claimed President Trump's Twitter account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee.”
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
After more investigating Twitter figured out that this was not "inadvertent." It was one of those crazy things employees do on their final day working at a job.
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
For a long time Twitter has been criticized for a bias against conservatives.
Per Daily Wire:
Political analyst Nick Short — who serves as the Digital Media Director at the Security Studies Group — highlighted key concerns this incident raises.
"Did this ‘customer support Twitter employee’ also mess with Trump's @POTUS Twitter account? Did he steal any private info as well?" Short tweeted.
In another tweet, Short pointed out how this is most likely a reflection of the culture at Twitter.
"Think about this next time you contact ‘twitter customer support.’ Guaranteed this employee & fellow co-workers all share the same ideology," Short wrote.
GAB — the new social media platform that bills itself as a free speech platform — hammered Twitter.
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/926275976673267712
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/926282374257807361
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/926274830726520833
Just days before this Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee and revealed that Twitter censored tweets during the 2016 election that were damaging to the Democratic Party.
Per his written testimony:
Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.
Was this as simple as a guy having fun on his last day at a job or was it an abuse of power that he should be prosecuted for?
Leave a Reply