Twitter was in a panic when President Donald Trump’s account was disabled.
For 11 minutes Thursday night, when President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was unexpectedly disabled, Twitter went into panic mode.
At the company, customer service representatives, public relations managers and executives — including Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey — were bombarded by people asking what had happened to the president’s account, which Trump regularly uses as a megaphone for all manner of matters. No one had answers, according to current and former Twitter employees who were involved or briefed on the situation, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Trump’s Twitter account was quickly restored, but the internal scramble continued. Initially, Twitter executives believed the action had been an accident by an employee.
Only after further review did executives discover that it was a contractor who was leaving Twitter that day who had disabled Trump’s account, said the people involved in the matter.
The incident immediately made the unnamed contractor a hero to some and a villain to others for muting, even temporarily, Trump. Yet the outcome for Twitter was black and white: It was another fiasco that the social media company had to clean up.
The temporary deletion of Trump’s account capped a rough week for Twitter, which has been under scrutiny for online abuse and how its service can be misused.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Twitter had appeared at congressional hearings in Washington, where lawmakers grilled the company — along with Google and Facebook — for their roles in spreading divisive messages during the 2016 campaign. At the time, Twitter pledged that it would take on more security measures. Yet Trump’s deleted account showed how empty some of those promises seemed to be. On Friday, the company tweeted that it had added new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the incident.
The discovery that it was a contractor who deleted Trump’s account is difficult for Twitter, as well as other technology companies. Nearly every major technology company including Google, Facebook and Apple relies on contract employees to fill positions. In general, the jobs tend to be nontechnical roles such as customer support or administrative and operational positions.
Many of these people work side by side with fulltime employees, but they are often paid significantly less, are identified with different color employee badges, and are not afforded the same perks and amenities that full-time staff have. Many complain of being treated like second-class citizens.