It was a huge day around the world on Friday, Jan. 20, 2017, as Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. On that same day, a lot of changes were made and not everyone was happy with all of them. As a matter of fact, the changes that made people the most upset were to the White House website, which saw the disappearance of pages for LGBT, civil rights, and climate change.
Which pages actually disappeared from the White House website?
One of the first pages that many realized was gone was the pages for LGBT and Climate Change.
As a matter of fact, all references to those two terms appeared to be scrubbed from the website almost instantly on Friday, and a lot of people took notice.
The White House removed its climate change web page. And the healthcare, civil rights and LGBT sections. Just thought you should know.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 20, 2017
Shortly after that, many started to realize that the pages for health care (Obamacare) and civil rights were gone as well from the White House website. Immediately, people were up in arms over this situation, and it was a bit scary to think that such serious changes were being made so quickly. Of course, there was a lot of backlash coming toward Donald Trump for these changes and the thought that he had abolished all of the ideas completely.
Where exactly did the pages go after being removed from the White House website?
Now, while it is true that the terms "LGBT" and "climate change," among others, were absent from the official site of the White House on Inauguration Day 2017, they weren't specifically removed by Donald Trump. Yes, searching for the terms reveal no results, but again, it is likely that the terms were not intentionally removed because of what they are.
All of those pages were moved in a digital transition that had them go from the official White House site to the Obama White House Archives site. Considering that these were content pages created during the administration of President Barack Obama, they were simply moved to the archives after he was no longer in office. All of those pages are still in existence and have not been entirely scrubbed or deleted.
The same type of thing happened on Twitter on Inauguration Day 2017. No longer does Barack Obama have the official "@POTUS" handle on Twitter, as that now belongs to Donald Trump. Obama's new handle is "@POTUS44" and that is where all of his tweets and information has been transferred.
