Twitter says it will transfer @POTUS to Joe Biden when he is sworn in as president, along with other official accounts; Facebook says it will do the same
which allows rule-breaking tweets to remain up, with warning labels — the moment that Biden is sworn in to office.” https://twitter.com/... Ben Pershing / @benpershing : The federal government is giving the Biden team limited help in securing its email and other communications despite concerns the transition could be a top espionage target https://www.wsj.com/... Thanks: @dlberes
Biden's team takes control of @POTUS and other official handles at noon on Inauguration Day, but without the tens of millions of inherited followers the 2017 transfer delivered — institutional reach resets to zero.
Trump-era tweets on the transferred accounts are preserved via archiving rather than deleted, keeping a public record while clearing the timeline for the new administration.
Second-order effects
Starting at zero shifts the value back toward personal campaign handles like @JoeBiden, which keep their followings across the transition — weakening the official-account monopoly on immediate presidential reach.
With private platforms now executing the mechanics of a change of administration, future transition teams must negotiate follower policy, labeling, and archival terms directly with Twitter and Facebook rather than assume continuity.
Third-order effects
If each transfer renegotiates the rules, platform companies become standing custodians of presidential digital assets — an informal but recurring role in the peaceful transfer of power that no statute currently governs.
The zero-follower precedent could push administrations to treat official accounts as disposable and invest permanently in channels they own, changing how the presidency builds direct-to-public distribution.
The trend: Presidential social-media handovers are hardening into a formalized, platform-administered ritual of American power transitions — with each cycle's terms set anew by the companies, not by law.
New: @POTUS will transfer to Biden at noon on inauguration day, per Twitter, no matter what the Trump team does. (I'd wondered, is there a sticky note with a password that has to get handed over? Nope.) https://www.politico.com/...
Good to know. We haven't heard anything about how this @whitehouse plans to handle the digital transition, presumably because Trump is in denial & refuses to begin, but this is wonderfully banal. TBD if @Transition46 will push a new .gov live as power transfers, but... probably. …
I doubt Trump cares much about the @POTUS account, but it's still impressive the level of Facebook's commitment to avoiding any appearance of a spine on even such a mundane a question as this https://twitter.com/...
Why would this be even vaguely in question? Biden will get sworn-in as president on January 20, so obviously he'll get the POTUS Twitter handle then too. https://twitter.com/...
Trump's personal account, “will lose the protections it carries under Twitter's ‘world leaders’ policy — which allows rule-breaking tweets to remain up, with warning labels — the moment that Biden is sworn in to office.” https://twitter.com/...
NEW: The Trump administration is not giving Joe Biden's transition team access to government email, so Biden's team is implementing its own cybersecurity protocols largely without government help. w/ @dnvolz https://www.wsj.com/...
New: Trump's refusal to accept Biden's win has forced his transition team to secure their own data because the official gov't network for transitions has not been made available to them, prompting fears of exposure to foreign espionage. w/ @AndrewRestuccia https://www.wsj.com/...
The federal government is giving the Biden team limited help in securing its email and other communications despite concerns the transition could be a top espionage target https://www.wsj.com/...
Remember when Republicans spent the entire 2016 campaign pretending they cared about secure servers and the implications on national security? https://twitter.com/...
The Trump administration refuses to provide robust cyber defenses or govt-hosted, CISA-protected email accounts to the Biden transition team. Left to fend for itself, the team has distributed security keys, limited shared-drive access, and trained staff. https://www.wsj.com/...
When it comes to protecting sensitive information from foreign hackers, President-elect Joe Biden's team is largely on its own with limited federal cybersecurity assistance https://www.wsj.com/...
Sigh. Apparently the incoming administration to the US is operating on a Google Business account, as Trump administration is blocking their transition support. https://www.wsj.com/...
The Trump administration hasn't recognized Biden's win and that's caused all sorts of issues. A big one: Biden's team doesn't have access to the government's cyber support, making them vulnerable to foreign espionage via @AndrewRestuccia, @dnvolz https://www.wsj.com/...
I hope everyone in the @transition46 has access to infosec experts who helped lock down networks, laptops, tablets, & smartphones with strong passwords, 2FA, uses encrypted messaging, & modeling the threat of multiple state actors trying to compromise them — because they are. htt…