A day after his personal Twitter account was taken down by a rogue employee for a brief amount of time, President Trump took to Twitter to acknowledge the incident, and attempted turn it into a victory of sorts. “I guess the word must finally be getting out – and having an impact,” he tweeted.
My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
On Thursday afternoon, Trump’s account suddenly disappeared, only to be fully restored 11 minutes later. Twitter initially blamed the mishap on “human error,” but later in the evening revealed that a departing employee had taken the liberty to disconnect the President’s account on his or her last day with the company.
The identity of the rogue now-former Twitter employee is still unknown, despite many offers to buy her or him a drink.
All joking aside, some have questioned how a random employee was able to deactivate the account of perhaps the most powerful Twitter user in the world. Twitter said on Friday that it had put new safeguards in place to prevent similar incidents in the future, but declined to comment further on the nature of these measures. “We take this seriously and our teams are on it,” the company said in a tweet.
Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
The take-down of Trump’s account received extra attention because of his tweet antics, which critics have charged have at times amounted to bullying and harassment, and included threats of war. Coincidentally, Twitter updated its rules for abusive behavior Friday. In a blog post announcing the changes, Twitter reiterated that the newsworthiness of any flagged tweet would impact any decision on measures taken against its author:
“Context — including if the behavior is targeted, if a report has been filed and by whom, and if the Tweet itself is newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest — is crucial when evaluating abusive behavior and determining appropriate enforcement actions.”
Update: 10:55 am: Updated with a new statement from Twitter.