Twitter plans to reset White House accounts

On Wednesday, as President-elect Joe Biden completes his transition into the White House, several social media companies will be completing their own transitions of highly followed official accounts.

But the handoff will not be as seamless as it was four years ago, when President Barack Obama turned over the keys of much of his social empire to President Donald Trump.

In 2017, Obama passed on official Twitter accounts to Trump, along with the millions of followers the accounts had gathered. Since then, Trump’s digital team has used the accounts as megaphones for the administration’s agenda and built the follower numbers higher: @POTUS has 33.3 million followers, @WhiteHouse has 26 million, @ FLOTUS has 16.4 million and @VP has 10.3 million. The @POTUS account alone has nearly tripled in followers under Trump.

But this year, instead of simply handing them over as it has before, Twitter will not carry over the followers of each account as Biden assumes control. Instead, accounts with much smaller followings, mostly created last week, will be transformed into the official ones.

The transitions mean the Biden digital operation will have to build new followings from scratch, instead of getting a head start from its predecessor as Trump had.

Twitter said it would alert users to the new accounts.

@PresElectBiden, an account that has posted just once and has fewer than 1 million followers, will become @POTUS, taking with it however many followers it has Wednesday afternoon.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will bring her 5.3 million followers from her own account @SenKamalaHarris over to @VP.

The account for Biden’s transition, @ Transition46, has 1.5 million followers and will become @WhiteHouse.

Rob Flaherty, who will be the director of digital strategy in the Biden administration, told Bloomberg News last week that Twitter’s failure to pass over the followers of the official accounts was unfair.