Hunt Is On For Trump’s Mystery Twitter Silencer — Who Is This Culprit Of The 11-Minute Deactivation?
Trump’s Twitter account was down for only 11 minutes on Thursday evening, but with the amount of coverage this event has pulled in, one might think it was deactivated for a huge chunk of time. The headlines are still blaring about this unknown “hero” who took down Trump from Twitter and stifled him, even if it was only for 11 minutes. This caused a bit of hoopla both in and out of the White House, and this incident seems to be taking on a life of its own.
With the facts about Trump’s Twitter page debacle seemingly all revealed, there doesn’t appear to be much more to say. What else is there to elaborate on when it comes to the 11 minutes in November when Trump couldn’t take to Twitter and his followers couldn’t find his Twitter page?
It seems this anonymous person still has not come forth to take a bow as the person who silenced Trump for 11 minutes, according to Yahoo News. Still, this unknown person remains the biggest social media mystery today and Yahoo reports people want to hear from this mystery man or woman.
A quick recap on the details for those who may not have heard the news — For 11 minutes starting at about 7 p.m. Thursday, Trump’s Twitter account was gone; it was mysteriously taken down and it vanished without a trace.
For Trump’s Twitter followers, all they could get was an error page saying, “Sorry this page doesn’t exist.” Attempting to navigate to Trump’s Twitter page was fruitless, but only for this little amount of time. Trump himself turned to his staff and asked that they attempt to fix it when he could not access his Twitter page.
According to the Twitter Government, this was done by a Twitter customer support employee on his or her last day of employment. The first tweet sent out by the Twitter Government is seen below, followed by the second one, which gives the details of what happened.
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Yahoo asks, “Are you that anonymous patriot? Do you have any idea who that anonymous patriot is? If so, we’d love to hear from you.” They go on to say that they consider this act as “the work of a hero with nothing to lose. And, friend, we’d love to talk.”
The article, which first appeared on the Huffington Post, offers up several ways to get a hold with the Huffington Post writer, who is wanting an interview with the mysterious person. They are even interested in talking to anyone who knows who this person is.
They ask, “So if this former employee is you ? or if you know anything about who it might be ? there are a few different ways you can reach out.” They go on to give an email address, PGP key, offer a chat over Signal, and even give the option of having a secure communication over SecureDrop.
Fox News show The Five talked about Trump’s Twitter account being taken down for those 11 minutes and brought up some concerns about how easily this was done. They have concerns that it may be just as easy for one of the Twitter support people to get into Trump’s Twitter account and post fake news. Millions tune into Trump’s Twitter account, so one fake sentence declaring war or a fake emergency situation could start a panic among the masses.
Twitter employee deletes Donald Trump's account on last day in the job and becomes instant hero https://t.co/oS6m50CMHf
— Socialist Voice ? (@SocialistVoice) November 3, 2017
The New York Times released some new details on this hero employee today. They report that the person who did this was not a full-time Twitter employee, but a contractor working at Twitter at the time. The people who reported this to the Times “spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential.”
This brings up a problem of third-party contractors working for both Twitter and Facebook. Representatives of both social media platforms spent time this week in congressional hearings over their plans to hire more people in an attempt to prohibit the misuse of their social media sites. Most of these people they hire to do this will be third-party contractors, much like the person who allegedly took down Trump’s Twitter account. Does this pose yet another problem for the social media sites?
As for now, there is one mystery Twitter contractor who people are just dying to meet. This person is being hailed as a hero and who just might go down in social media history books as the person who silenced Trump for 11 minutes one day in November. That is if the enthusiasm shown for this mystery person offers any indication of how this will be remembered.
[Featured Image by Andrew Harnik/AP Images]
