Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized Saturday for mistakenly forcing around 560,000 users to follow President Donald Trump on Twitter.
Dorsey blamed technical problems stemming from the transfer of the official @POTUS from former President Barack Obama to Trump.
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
The Twitter co-founder used the social media platform to explain why the problem occurred. He started out by saying that the Obama administration strove for the official White House transition to include digital aspects, such as social media.
“Because @POTUS is an institutional account (not personal) they felt it only fair to transition accounts with followers intact, but 0 tweets,” Dorsey explained, with “they” seemingly referring to the Obama administration.
So it seems that anyone who was following the Obama Administration on Twitter were also set to follow the account for the Trump Administration. (RELATED: Obama Mocks Trump, Says If He Can’t Handle Twitter, He Can’t Handle Nuclear Codes)
But, according to Dorsey, “some people who unfollowed @POTUS in the past were mistakenly marked to now follow @POTUS.”
Dorsey said they estimate around 560,000 Twitter users were affected. “This was a mistake, it wasn’t right, we own it, and we apologize. No excuses,” he continued.
This isn’t the first time a technical glitch has caused problems for the social media company.
Dorsey’s own Twitter account was inadvertently suspended in November. Twitter also overcharged marketers as much as 35 percent after a bug in video advertising metrics was discovered.
Trump has been an active user of Twitter mainly as a means to circumvent the press and get his unadulterated message directly to the public. (RELATED: Twitter Doesn’t Rule Out Banning Trump If He Gets Too Unruly)
Sean Spicer, Trump’s press secretary, is excited about the prospect of Trump continuing to use the social media platform.
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