A ‘rogue’ Twitter customer support employee suspended Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Thursday on his last day at the job – leaving the President’s nearly 43 million followers Trumpless for approximately 11 minutes, and raising major concerns over the security of a platform used by Trump to speak directly to the world.
Trump's Twitter account has vanished pic.twitter.com/B0hQpBO9OW
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 2, 2017
President Trump BANNED from Twitter?! pic.twitter.com/hNxSK0Q3ri
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) November 2, 2017
Before Trump’s account was restored, people proceeded to lose their shit – and speculation over what it meant spread like wildfire.
11 minutes later, democracy was restored and tits calmed around the country.
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
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
though Twitter’s explanation of a disgruntled employee’s last-day revenge on the President is seriously alarming. What if a rogue employee could gain access and send a tweet as Trump, saying something to the effect of “Nukes are headed to Little Kim right now, enjoy the fireworks!”
So there ya go – disgruntled $TWTR employees can apparently do whatever the fuck they want to anyone’s account. Maybe this explains the well documented selective enforcement of their TOS.
we have found footage of the disgruntled employee who pulled Trump’s account pic.twitter.com/INCyVeSH7G
— Tom Martin (@TomKCTV5) November 3, 2017
Twitter employee uses last day at work to deactivate US President Donald Trump's account https://t.co/FV3wk9OU4B pic.twitter.com/vnxmc5uEHS
— ABC News (@abcnews) November 3, 2017
I survived the Trump twitter outage
November 2, 2017
6:58PM to 7:04PM #neverforget
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) November 2, 2017
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on TwitterTrump's twitter account vanishing and then reappearing moments later is the best evidence yet that the events of the past 2 years are the result of warring sects of time travellers
— Nfinit (@Nfinit) November 2, 2017
Guaranteed this “rogue employee” excuse is bullshit. More like premeditated test. It shows how easy it is to cut Trump off the communication line when the deepstaters need it.
Twitter isn’t democracy. It is a private company. It is Trump’s fault for using Twitter as his populist podium to tweet important foreign policy and his idiotic brand of Reality PresidenTV “directly to the people from the shitter” for making a hacked nuclear tweet a real threat. Back channels have been established with NK now so I think this is less likely to induce more than a popular panic and a more mature presidential tweet policy. HAPPY!
well, it’s a public company. The argument is a little too basic. A company should have policies and procedures. Identity theft is a big issue, and this is kind of in that realm. Plus, this issue should hopefully raise concern about the product…the fact that one low level employee has the power to terminate a user with the push of a button. That can hurt Twitter’s bottom line in the long run, so they would ultimately have a vested interest in not having this kind of problem.
the “don’t like it don’t use it” argument that keeps popping up whenever a right leaning person/entity is unfairly treated or denied by a left leaning entity is just going to result in a complete second ecosystem.
At some point, the conservatives will just build their own banking and social media systems.
What it says to me is that the “leader of the free world” whose words can start wars, should not be using a medium as insecure as Twitter as one of his principal means of communicating.
It’s lazy and irresponsible.
Matt Bear is right
It’s really no different than someone shutting off phone, ATM, electric power, grabbing someone’s mail out of the box and throwing it away. I hate to say we need more laws, but either high tech gets it together in these areas of they will find federal regulations as tight as banking/finance crawling on their tail.
A watershed moment, I suspect the use of Twitter by Trump has peaked, it’s too unsecured to be utilized by the President of the United States for communications.