President Donald Trump responded on Friday after a Twitter employee deleted his account a day earlier.
Describing the Twitter employee as a “rogue employee” Trump said his account was taken down for 11 minutes.
“I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact,” Trump wrote on his restored Twitter account.
Twitter has confirmed that it was a rogue employee who did the deactivating, saying the employee was on the last day of his job when the incident happened.
“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,” Twitter said in a tweet.
The incident raises questions about how Twitter secures the president’s personal account, especially given the fact that Tweets by the president can influence world events.
Trump has almost 42 million followers on his personal Twitter account @RealDonaldTrump.
Even before becoming president, Trump was a prolific user of the platform, giving his opinion on matters and current events. He has published over 36,000 tweets since joining the platform back in March of 2009.
Twitter has been a vital tool in his winning the election and getting his message out directly to the people.
“You know, when the press is dishonest—which is most of the time—and when they say, like, I don’t want to build a wall, I can tweet ‘That was a false story,’” Trump said during a rally in Huntsville, Alabama, on Sept. 22.
“That is the great thing about Twitter,” Trump said.
Research by Pew Research Center published in early October found that reporting on the 45th president has been the most negative compared to other presidents over the past 25 years.
The research shows that only 5 percent of media reporting during the period was positive. Sixty-two percent of stories were negative, and 33 percent were neither.
By comparison, coverage of President Barack Obama during the same time period was 42 percent positive and 20 percent negative. For President George W. Bush, the coverage was 22 percent positive and 28 percent negative. And for President Bill Clinton, it was 27 percent positive and 28 percent negative.
The study also revealed that most media coverage of Trump focused on his character traits rather than policy.
Only 31 percent of all stories published on Trump focused on policy issues, compared to 50 percent for Obama, 65 percent for Bush, and 58 percent for Clinton.
“The evaluations of President Trump were far more negative and less positive than those of his predecessors,” wrote the Pew Research Center.
