Twitter hands over @POTUS account to Biden as president of the United States

The official Twitter account of the United States presidency has passed into the hands of Democrat Joe Biden.

Twitter has delivered this Wednesday the official accounts of the United States Government to the Administration of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, after the swearing in of their positions, thus following the tradition started by the social network with Barack Obama.

These are the users @POTUS (for the acronym in English of President Of The United States) that previously belonged to the outgoing president Donald Trump - although the republican preferred to use his personal account, finally suspended for incitement to violence -;

@VP (in reference to the vice presidency), which has passed from Mike Pence (who did use this account) to his successor, Kamala Harris;

that of the new first lady, Jill Biden, @FLOTUS, and that of the White House press secretary, @PressSec, among others.

These institutional accounts do not belong to any individual in particular, but are reserved for the official use of the Government of the day.

The accounts have undergone a "digital reset" and were starting from scratch, that is, with practically no followers and no publications.

An hour after Biden's swearing in,

@

POTUS had already tweeted twice and had two million followers.

Folks - This will be the account for my official duties as President.

At 12:01 PM on January 20th, it will become @POTUS.

Until then, I'll be using @JoeBiden.

And while you're here, follow @FLOTUSBiden @SenKamalaHarris @SecondGentleman and @ Transition46.

- President Biden (@POTUS) January 15, 2021

During the Obama Administration, Twitter wanted to make the messages broadcast on its platform from the US presidency official and centralize them on a single channel.

In 2009 he created @POTUS and the idea worked.

In 2017, when the Democrat left office, a new account was created for Trump and the one that the Obama team had managed was renamed

@

POTUS44, in reference to the number of his presidency.

The transition of power in networks had been easy and clean.

The same did not happen with Donald Trump, as the Republican decided to preferably tweet from his personal account

@

realDonaldTrump

,

finally blocked permanently by Twitter after the assault of hundreds of Republican supporters on the Capitol on January 6.

With Joe Biden, less controversial behavior is expected on networks and channeled through official accounts.

As it did with Obama, the social network has created another account,

@

POTUS45 (in reference to the number of the Republican presidency), in which all the publications made during Trump's term will be in the official account and that will become part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The abandonment of @POTUS by Trump

Trump began his presidency on January 20, 2017, ending some customs of the previous term in the management of networks.

The first was to refuse to use only the official account

@

POTUS, as his official communication channel and to continue tweeting, in his own way, from his personal account.

The Republican came to the presidency with a very popular private account that was growing by leaps and bounds.

When he announced his candidacy in 2015,

@

realDonaldTrump had 2.98 million followers.

The figure rose to 13 million when he won the presidential election in November 2016. Today, despite the fact that the account is suspended for violating the rules of the social network, 88 million follow.

Throughout his term, the Republican had six times the number of followers.

Although

@

POTUS continued to be used as an official channel, and retweeted the messages posted by Trump's account, the reach was much less than that of

@

realDonaldTrump.

As of this Wednesday, the

@

POTUS

account

passes into the hands of Biden's team, without any scratches and with a

blank

feed

.

It is an analogy, much like Twitter, of the beginning of a new era.

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