It appears that Twitter had a bitter employee who wanted to create a controversy and succeeded in creating a scandal after deactivating US President, Donald Trump’s Account yesterday. It was briefly deactivated for 11 minutes and the social media firm is now investigating.
Following investigations by Twitter, the firm stated that the account had been restored and such an incidence will not recur. 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.’
Image Source: CNBC
Trump joined Twitter in March 2009 and has since then been a regular with his controversial tweets that often stir open debates and negative reactions. With 41.7 million followers, Trump has been using this medium to promote his policies and attack his political opponents since he assumed the position as US president and even during the political campaign. I suppose, that this was a well-planned strategy.
This incidence has raised a lot of questions about social media security. If an ex-employee could toy with Trump’s account, a high profile figure, whose tweets are known to influence decisions, mindsets, and events, then a bigger scandal could be created. Unfortunately, this comes at a period when tech companies are under attacks from the US lawmakers for failing to curb the spread of Russian Propaganda and misinformation.
Twitter itself has been criticised for not doing enough to protects its users and ignoring complaints of abuse. Now, the worst of them all is the issue with loose-security. If a Twitter employee has the authority to delete accounts, it means any of them could as well do worse by sending counterfeit tweets with high-profile personalities, thereby creating a bigger scandal.
It comes down to the issue of security.
Twitter has failed in this aspect and it won’t come as a surprise if an account is hacked and used to send counterfeit tweets. Who knows why the ex-employee decided to stir such a controversy? Shame the social media firm? Or, get back at them? With Uber and Tesla under lawsuits charged by employees, this could be another case of an aggrieved employee.
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