Biden administration won’t inherit Trump’s Twitter followers on official WH accounts

The incoming Biden administration will have to build up its online audience from scratch, as Twitter told the transition team it will break with recent tradition and won’t transfer over president Trump’s followers on official presidential accounts.

“In 2016, the Trump admin absorbed all of President Obama's Twitter followers on @POTUS and @WhiteHouse -- at Team 44's urging,” Rob Flaherty, the president-elect's digital director, tweeted Monday. “In 2020, Twitter has informed us that as of right now the Biden administration will have to start from zero.”

Mr Flaherty added the Biden team fought this decision, but was told the social network’s choice was “unequivocal.”

A Twitter spokesperson told Politico it was working to resolve issues with the transition team.

"Twitter has been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers," Twitter spokesperson Nick Pacilio said in a statement.

When president Trump was elected, the Obama administration passed on accounts and followers for the president’s official Twitter page, as well as that of the White House. For presidential business, Mr Trump mainly uses his personal account, which has more than 88 million followers, but the official accounts Mr Biden is set to inherit still command significant followings: @WhiteHouse has over 26 million followers, and @POTUS over 33 million.

The Obama campaign may have pioneered using social media for politics, but Trump took things to a new level on Twitter, becoming a one-man misinformation factory that the social network struggled to contain. His presidency has been defined largely by what comes from his feed: official hiring and firing decisions, policy announcements like his trans military ban, insults to opponents, retweeted conspiracy theories and hate videos.

These rapid-fire tweets from the most powerful man in the world presented a complicated legal question: do personal tweets count as official presidential statements, as policy? At times, such as during the cases challenging the Muslim ban, federal courts viewed presidential tweets as a legally relevant guide to the president’s intentions, though the Supreme Court hasn’t adopted that interpretation.

Twitter often labeled the president’s tweet as contested or incorrect—“this claim about election fraud is disputed” came to accompany nearly every tweet the president made about the election—but gives extra latitude to politicians when it comes to comments that bump against its terms of service because they are relevant to public interest.

In response to these checks on his tweets, the president has said the network is “out of control,” and called for reforming section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely shields social media companies from liability relating to their users’ actions.

The president will lose his Twitter protections once he becomes a private citizen again in January, a Twitter spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, and could have his posts taken down rather than flagged.