President-elect Joe Biden has been given his new official POTUS Twitter account, but has been forced to start it with zero followers.
The Biden campaign is unhappy with the move, which marks a change from the previous transition from Barack Obama.
The new account, @PresElectBiden, will transform into the official @POTUS on inauguration day, January 20.
In its first six hours online the new account gained nearly 400,000 followers.
Joe Biden’s own account has 24 million followers.
The president-elect’s team has also registered new accounts – @FLOTUSBiden for the future first lady, Jill Biden, and for the first time, @SecondGentleman, for Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff.
President Donald Trump inherited the POTUS account’s 13 million or so followers when it moved to him from President Obama – but that will not happen this time.
Joe Biden’s team was told about the move less than a month ago, and said it meant “the administration will have to start from zero”.
Twitter has not explained why the decision was made, and said it had nothing further to add beyond an official blog post laying out transition plans.
In that post Twitter said: “These institutional accounts will not automatically retain the followers from the prior administration.”
It doesn’t explain why.
However, Twitter said that people who previously followed the official @POTUS and @VP accounts, or the personal accounts of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – would receive notifications giving them the option to follow the new official ones.
President Barack Obama was the first US leader to have an official Twitter account. The @POTUS account was set up during his tenure in 2015.
At the end of Obama’s second term, a transition plan for handing over the official accounts to President Trump was drawn up – with @POTUS going to the new administration.
All of Barack Obama’s official tweets were archived for posterity on a separate account, @POTUS44 (where they can still be read today).
President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was down for 11 minutes on November 2, the social media company said.
A Twitter employee deactivated the @realdonaldtrump account, the company said, clarifying that it had been their last day in the job.
Twitter is now investigating.
Tweets from President Trump, who has 41.7 million followers, have frequently caused controversy.
The latest incident has sparked debate about the security of the president’s account, given the potential consequences of posts falsely attributed to Donald Trump being published.
However, @POTUS, the official account of the US president, was unaffected.
On November 2, visitors to Donald Trump’s page for a short time could only see a message that read: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
After the account was restored, Donald Trump’s first tweet was about the Republican Party’s tax cuts plan.
Twitter said it was investigating the problem and taking steps to avoid it happening again.
It later said: “Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review.”
Donald Trump joined Twitter in March 2009 and he has tweeted more than 36,000 times.
He has been actively using the social media platform to promote his policies and also attack his political opponents both during the presidential campaign in 2016 and since taking office in January.
In one interview he said that when someone said something about him, he was able to go “bing, bing, bing on Twitter” – and take care of it.
After the president appeared to directly threaten North Korea with destruction in a tweet in September, Twitter was forced to justify allowing the post to stand.
President Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
Twitter said that President Trump’s tweet was “newsworthy”.
Donald Trump’s allies have also got into hot water over their use of Twitter.
Roger Stone, who advised him during his election campaign, was suspended from Twitter after he used abusive and homophobic language to target journalists, including a gay CNN presenter, Don Lemon.
He said he had been told by Twitter that he had violated its rules.
Roger Stone said he would sue Twitter for blocking his account.
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