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Interesting, I'm curious why a wipe of followers of a government office twitter account. Does twitter do that for other similar official accounts?

• remram 6y ago
  Yeah, when Obama was elected, @POTUS was renamed to @POTUS44 to give @POTUS to the new president (however Trump stuck to his personal account). I'm not sure how long that system had been in place though.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    are all the variations of @POTUSXX reserved, or does a squatter get their account yanked every 4-8 years?
    • bastawhiz 6y ago
      Twitter has historically yanked usernames. An unofficial perk of being an employee, I've been told, is being able to yank a disused username for yourself. I know a few folks who have done it.
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    I think the tweets were archived to @POTUS44 but the followers remained.
    • remram 6y ago
      You are right, I remember another subtlety: if you followed @POTUS you were made to follow both @POTUS44 and @POTUS.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Yeah, when Obama was elected, @POTUS was renamed to @POTUS44 to give @POTUS to the new president @POTUS was archived to @POTUS44, but the followers remained with @POTUS (well, both accounts, actually.) This transition Twitter has declared they will archive @POTUS and other White House accounts and reset followers to 0, instead of retaining followers tas was done at the last transition. > I'm not sure how long that system had been in place though. @POTUS was launched May 18, 2015, so it's not like there was a prior transition to have set precedent.