Twitter and the 2021 US Presidential Transition: A Timeline

Twitter has outlined its strategy for US Inauguration Day 2021, scheduled for next Wednesday, January 20th. This is the day president-elect Joe Biden will officially assume the office of the 46th US president, and vice president-elect Kamala Harris will be sworn in as Vice President.

The social media company explains in a blog post that “this year, unique and complex circumstances mean that most individuals will need to experience this significant event in a virtual format.” The post details how Twitter will manage the transfer of power as the Trump administration concludes its term.

“As Twitter will function as a platform for both viewing and discussing this political event, and will also be central to the transfer of official government communication channels, we aim to be transparent about what users can anticipate seeing on the platform,” the company states.

The inauguration ceremony will be broadcast live on Twitter through various accounts, including those of news organizations, as well as the official inauguration accounts, @JCCIC and @BidenInaugural.

Twitter will also provide a livestream of the event through its US Elections Hub, where it will share curated Moments, Lists, and recommended accounts to follow.

Upon taking office, both Biden and Harris will gain access to the @POTUS and @VP Twitter accounts. The transition on the day will also include the @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS, and @PressSec accounts.

Twitter has also announced that Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff, will utilize a new official account designated as @SecondGentleman. (The reasoning behind not using ‘SGOTUS’ remains unclear, likely due to the unfavorable nature of the acronym. Update: A Twitter representative informed us that the ‘@SecondGentleman’ account “was the preferred choice”.) 

Mirroring the process when president Obama left office, Twitter will transfer the existing institutional accounts of the Trump administration to the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). This ensures that the outgoing administration’s tweets and account history will remain publicly accessible (with account usernames updated to indicate their archived status, for example, @POTUS will be archived as @POTUS45).

However, Trump’s personal account, which he often employed for political purposes, frequently using capital letters and expressing personal grievances, has been removed from public view following Twitter’s decision to permanently ban him last week due to repeated violations of its rules. Consequently, there will likely be a significant gap in Nara’s archive of Trump’s activity.

“This archiving and transfer process applies solely to official government Twitter accounts,” Twitter confirmed.

Since late last year, it has been known that transitioning @POTUS and institutional accounts will not automatically carry over followers from the previous administration. Twitter has not yet provided an explanation for this policy.

The company today reiterated that the current (33.3M) followers of @POTUS and other official accounts will receive a notification regarding the archival process, offering them the “option” to follow the new account holders.

This represents a change from 2017, when Trump inherited approximately 14M followers from president Obama’s @POTUS account. Biden will instead begin his presidential tweeting with a fresh start.

“We are not providing further comment on follower transfer beyond the information in this blog,” a Twitter spokesperson stated when questioned about this matter.

Considering the turbulent events in the US capital last week, when supporters of the outgoing president breached security barriers and caused disruption, technology platforms are understandably approaching the 2021 transition with caution, aiming to prevent their tools from being used to broadcast another instance of civil unrest (or something more severe).

Trump has also continued to assert his unsubstantiated claim that the election was compromised by voter fraud.

Although he refrained from directly repeating this claim when he bypassed Twitter’s ban on his personal account earlier this week by posting a video on the official @WhiteHouse account, he did decry the “incursion at the US capital”, claimed to “unequivocally condemn the violence” witnessed last week, and called for unity. Twitter has imposed strict limitations on Trump’s statements on its platform to prevent the removal of his posts (and has restricted him to the official @POTUS channel), effectively placing him under a tight restriction on his speech.

In the video, Trump limited his criticisms to a few remarks regarding what he described as “the unprecedented assault on free speech” and labeled tech platforms’ censorship as “wrong” and “dangerous”, adding that “what is needed now is for us to listen to one another, not to silence one another”.

Several factors are at play here, but it’s important to note that Trump’s apparent remorse and late calls for unity have only emerged as he perceives his power diminishing.

Most significantly, his appeal for unity has only come after influential tech platforms took action to disable his platform for spreading divisive rhetoric—ending the years of preferential treatment they had extended to Trump, allowing him to disregard democratic norms and undermine the principles of civic conduct.

It is compelling to consider how different the 2021 US inauguration might have unfolded had platforms like Twitter consistently enforced their rules against Trump from the outset.

Instead, we are facing various restrictions, counting down the days until Biden takes office—and, above all, hoping for a peaceful transfer of power.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is correct when he acknowledged this week that Twitter has fallen short of its goal to “promote healthy conversation”. His company overlooked warnings about online toxicity for years. Trump is, to a significant extent, a consequence of this. 

In a section of Twitter’s transition handling blog post, titled “protecting the public conversation”, the company references a previous post from earlier this week outlining the steps it is taking to prevent its platform from being used to “incite violence, organize attacks, and disseminate deliberately misleading information about the election outcome” in the coming days.

These measures include the permanent suspension of approximately 70,000 accounts primarily dedicated to sharing content related to the QAnon conspiracy theory; a strengthened civic integrity policy; and the application of interaction limits on labeled tweets, as well as the blocking of violative keywords from appearing in Trends and search.

“These efforts, including our open communication with law enforcement, will continue through the inauguration and will be adjusted as needed if circumstances evolve in real-time,” the company adds, preparing for the possibility of further unrest.

This report has been updated with additional information from Twitter