Communications of the ACM
When Joe Biden Took the White House, He Also Took @WhiteHouse
This year, instead of simply handing over official Twitter accounts as it has before, Twitter did not carry over the followers of each account as Mr. Biden assumed control.
Credit: AP
As President Biden completed his transition into the White House, several social media companies were completing their own transitions of highly followed official accounts.
But the handoff wasn't as seamless as it was four years ago, when President Barack Obama turned over the keys of much of his social empire to President Donald J. Trump.
In 2017, Mr. Obama passed on official Twitter accounts to Mr. Trump, along with the millions of followers the accounts had gathered. Since then, Mr. Trump's digital team used the accounts as megaphones for his administration's agenda and built the follower numbers higher: before Mr. Biden's inauguration, @POTUS had 33.3 million followers, @WhiteHouse had 26 million, @FLOTUS had 16.4 million and @VP had 10.3 million. The @POTUS account alone had nearly tripled in followers under Mr. Trump.
But this year, instead of simply handing them over as it has before, Twitter did not carry over the followers of each account as Mr. Biden assumed control. Instead, accounts with much smaller followings, mostly created last week, were to be transformed into the official ones.
From The New York Times
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