Facebook will give presidential accounts to Biden even if Trump refuses to concede election

Facebook has followed Twitter in confirming that the presidential accounts on their respective platforms will be transferred from president Donald Trump to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.

"In 2017, we worked with both the Obama Administration and incoming Trump Administration to make sure the transition of their Facebook and Instagram accounts was seamless on January 20th, and we expect to do the same here," Facebook said.

The official presidential accounts include @POTUS, as well as @whitehouse, @VP, @FLOTUS, and a number of other official accounts are taxpayer funded. This is in contrast to the president’s personal account, @DonaldTrump, and his corresponding personal Twitter account @realDonaldTrump.

During the election, posts from the president’s personal pages were the most popular posts on Facebook despite the social media company adding warning labels to the posts.

Facebook will also fact-check Mr Trump’s posts when he leaves office; the social media company has staunchly said that it does not check political accounts for accuracy despite their potential to spread misinformation.

Once Mr Trump is a former official rather than a current one, different policies will apply. "Former candidates for office or former officials continue to be covered by our third-party fact-checking programme," Facebook policies state.

Twitter had previously confirmed the transition of the presidential accounts.

“Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021,” Twitter spokesperson Nick Pacilio said.

“As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration.”

Changing access to the Twitter accounts requires no sharing of information between the Trump and Biden teams, and the accounts will have every post archived and then deleted when president Biden assumes office.

Despite the handover, it is likely that president Donald Trump’s protests about the legitimacy of the election will continue from his personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Federal judges have dismissed lawsuits from the administration that the vote was rigged due to lack of evidence. "This court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations," Judge Brann wrote.

He added that he "has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens".

However, Mr Trump will lose the special protections for his personal account – which continually broke Twitter’s terms of service but remained active on the platform due to its ‘newsworthiness’ – and as such faces a potential ban.

The transfer of accounts has been difficult for the changing administrations. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration has stopped federal agencies from providing cybersecurity support – such as setting up and protecting government email accounts - leaving the Biden transition team to take care of its own cybersecurity.

As such, the Biden team have had to use Google Workplace, with all accounts being enrolled in both Google’s Advanced Protection Program and Google’s Enhanced Protection Program.