Some users claim Twitter autofollowed them to @POTUS after transition, even if they blocked/unfollowed/never followed the account before; Twitter investigates
A number of Twitter users tonight are claiming their accounts have somehow automatically followed the Twitter accounts, @POTUS …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Twitter handed the official @POTUS account to the incoming administration on January 20, 2017, it preserved the existing follower graph — and within hours users reported being autofollowed to the account despite having blocked, unfollowed, or never followed it. Two days later, Jack Dorsey apologized for the migration errors, saying they affected about 560K people and had been fixed (Dorsey's apology for the follower-migration errors).
The episode became the reference point for how presidential account handovers should work: when Twitter agreed to transfer @POTUS to Joe Biden in late 2020, the transition team announced that current followers would not carry over at all — a deliberate reversal of the 2017 carry-over approach, with the new @POTUS starting from zero.
First-order effects
- Roughly 560K users who had blocked or unfollowed @POTUS found themselves re-attached to the account without consent, forcing manual unfollows or blocks while Twitter ran its investigation.
- Twitter's own investigation confirmed the migration tooling, not user action, caused the follows — turning a routine account transfer into a public trust incident for the company.
Second-order effects
- The failure gave the next transition team leverage to demand a cleaner mechanism: rather than trusting Twitter's migration again, the Biden team secured a full follower reset for @POTUS.
- Facebook's parallel commitment to hand over official administration accounts meant the 2017 mistake set the de facto standard both platforms had to answer to.
Third-order effects
- Official government social media accounts are increasingly treated as institutional assets requiring audited, consent-respecting handovers rather than simple username transfers — with follower resets emerging as the safer default when migration integrity can't be guaranteed.
The trend: Presidential social-media handovers are shifting from error-prone follower migrations to deliberate zero-follower resets, as platforms absorb the reputational cost of getting consent mechanics wrong.