You may or may not know that in the days before the Inauguration, there was a big campaign on the Twitters to remind everyone to unfollow the @POTUS account. Personally I felt this was silly, and possibly the most ineffective form of government protest imaginable, not to mention irresponsible citizenship. “Hey, we have a frightening president now, let’s not look at anything he’s doing! That’ll keep us safe!”
Anyway, roughly the time of the Inauguration, Twitter renamed the @POTUS account to @POTUS44 to keep an archive of Barack Obama’s tweets. It’s apparently run by the National Archives, which makes sense. That action meant that everyone effectively unfollowed Trump’s @POTUS automatically, rendering the whole unfollow campaign beforehand moot.
If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t even be posting this.
Twitter apparently then got the bright idea to migrate everyone who had previously followed Obama’s @POTUS to Trump’s @POTUS. That wouldn’t have been so bad if they had gotten the list of who was following @POTUS at the time of the Inauguration, but it seems that they must have compiled the list of people who followed @POTUS some time in the past, because people suddenly found that they were following @POTUS again even though they had previously unfollowed it.
This did not go over too well in the Twitter community.
Again there were campaigns to remind everyone to double-check to make sure they weren’t “forced” to re-follow @POTUS. Because apparently this is the most important thing in the world for people to do in the Trump era.
Before anyone starts trying to help me by examining my followers, I’m still following @POTUS. I’m not going to unfollow it, because as I hinted above, that’s a bit childish and irresponsible. As a U.S. citizen, I kind of want to know what @POTUS is putting out there.
Besides, the very idea that one is taking a stand against tyranny by unfollowing a Twitter account is, well, incomprehensible to me. Twitter is just a dumb web site. It’s not a government agency, it’s not a system of record, it’s not any part of the legislative, executive, or judicial branches.
