Don't Cheer For The Twitter Employee Who Deleted Donald Trump's Account

from the that's-a-bad-thing dept

As you probably have heard, last night for a period of 11 minutes, Donald Trump's Twitter account looked like this:

Not surprisingly, lots of people noticed quickly... and, then it came back. Soon after, Twitter admitted it was "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee." Two hours later, this message was clarified to say that "done by a Twitter customer support employee... on the employee's last day."

This, in turn, led a bunch of folks on Twitter to start gleefully praising this employee (whose name is not yet known, but likely will be soon). Because it's Twitter, and Twitter can get giddy over stuff like this, there were lots of jokes and people calling this employee a hero and whatnot. (Update: A new report says that it wasn't even a full-time employee, but a contractor).

I take a very different view on this. Earlier this year, Cathy Gellis wrote a post here explaining why it would be a bad idea to kill Trump's Twitter account. You can read that post for details, but the larger point is that under no circumstances would such a move be viewed as anything other than a political statement. Twitter more or less admitted this a few weeks back when it made a public statement saying that it considers "newsworthiness" as a factor in determining whether a tweet violates its terms. And, by definition, the President's tweets are newsworthy.

The larger question, honestly, is how the hell a customer service rep, especially one who wasn't even a full time employee, but a contractor -- on his or her last day -- had the power to simply delete the President's twitter account. You can see how things got to this point: I'm sure in the early days, just about anyone could delete someone's account on the platform. Over time, I assume that the power was limited more and more to customer service reps -- but they were still granted the power to do so if it was necessary. But it's fairly incredible that there aren't at least some controls on this -- requiring a second person's permission? Locking certain key Twitter accounts? -- that would make what this employee did impossible.

And, of course, it's raising lots of other questions. Did this customer service rep have the ability to tweet as Trump? Considering how quickly the world reacts to Trump tweets, that could create serious havoc. I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty more on this soon, and Twitter will eventually share some sort of post mortem on new processes and controls that have been put in place, but the fact that this even happened in the first place is not a cause for celebration, but one for concern about how Twitter's controls and processes work.

Filed Under: controls, deleted accounts, donald trump, social media
Companies: twitter