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Twitter says safeguards taken after Trump account outage

04 November, 2017, 01:07 | Author: Jeannette Greene
  • Twitter says safeguards taken after Trump account outage

"We hold all accounts to the same rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether tweets violate our rules", Twitter said in a statement. Twitter said that the employee responsible was working their last day with the company, in the customer support sector. "We are conducting a full internal review".

"We are continuing to investigate and we are taking measures to prevent this from happening again", the statement pointed out very clearly.

Twitter users were swift to point out the potential security implications: "It is shocking that some random Twitter employee could shut down the president's account". Twitter customer support cannot, however, access customers' private direct messages, nor can they tweet on behalf of other users, these people said.

NBC News has reached out to the White House to clarify if any protocols surrounding the president's use of Twitter have been changed as the result of the incident.

Though the company initially said the incident was "inadvertent" and caused by "human error", details that emerged several hours later indicated it had been intentional.

A departing Twitter employee's temporary deactivation of Donald Trump's account has the technology giant facing scrutiny over how a worker was able to silence one of the world's most influential and high-profile online voices.


Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said the suspension reflected a need for Twitter to be more transparent about its ability to control accounts but also demonstrated the perils of a head of state relying on digital technology as a primary mode of communication.

There's "just a tool that naturally a small group of people for safety and abuse and hacking etc have access to that got abused by one person for eleven minutes", the former Twitter executive told CNN.

Twitter and other tech companies have ramped up their reliance on contractors due to pressure to respond more quickly and thoroughly to content violations. "Ain't that a bind?"

"My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee", Trump tweeted early Friday.

The statement left many question from the tech community and Washington unanswered, including how many people had access to Trump's account and what were the security protocols in dealing with accounts of influential personalities, especially those related to US national security.

Trump has tweeted 14 times (so far) since waking up Friday morning with his account fully operational.

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