Twitter ‘inadvertently deactivates’ Trump’s Twitter account

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By BNO NEWS

The personal Twitter account of President Donald Trump was briefly deleted on Thursday when an employee of the social networking website accidentally chose to deactivate the account.

The incident happened just before 7 p.m. ET on Thursday when the account, which has nearly 42 million followers, suddenly disappeared. It instead showed a message that said Trump’s personal account “doesn’t exist.”

The account came back online after about 11 minutes, but not before many users took notice. Trump’s followers were restored after about an hour, although the account appeared to have been removed from so-called Twitter Lists.

Twitter said in a statement that the account was “inadvertently deactivated” as a result of “human error” by a Twitter employee. Details were not immediately provided, but the company said it was investigating what happened.

“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the statement said.

Trump frequently uses his personal Twitter account to comment on current events. His opponents have at times called on Twitter to suspend his account, citing a number of apparent violations of the company’s terms of service.

Twitter clarified on September 25 that although it holds all accounts to the same rules, it takes a number of factors into account. “Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest,” the company said after Trump threatened North Korea in a tweet.

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