Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly accepted that roughly 560,000 were affected by an Inauguration Day error that saw users end up following Donald Trump’s new Twitter account without consent.
Dorsey has claimed that “Because @POTUS is an institutional account (not personal) they felt it only fair to transition accounts with followers intact, but 0 tweets.”
This meant that many people who had not signed up to follow Donald Trump on Twitter ended up following him anyway after the account changed hands. The same also happened with regards Vice President Mike Pence and Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Not only people who followed the previous POTUS and VP accounts were affected — many who has previously followed Obama’s POTUS account and had later unfollowed it were forced to re-follow the account under Trump’s name.
In many cases, notifications were also enabled without the permission of Twitter users.
Dorsey has taken to his own Twitter to clarify the issue, and apologise, writing “We’re sorry for the mistakes we’ve made here, and thank you all.”
All: we investigated what happened here, and we made some mistakes (which have been corrected). Some context first. https://t.co/W1n3Xs6LaN
— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017
1. People who followed @POTUS44 (Obama Admin) after 12pET were mistakenly set to also follow @POTUS (Trump Admin).
— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017
2. Some people who unfollowed @POTUS in the past were mistakenly marked to now follow @POTUS
— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017
This also affected other official Administration accounts like @VP, @WhiteHouse, and @PressSec.
— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017
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