President Donald Trump has been known to love and use Twitter a lot before and during his presidency career. President Trump has a total of 36,300 tweets on his realDonaldTrump Twitter account. But a few days ago on November 2, 2017, Trump's Twitter account was reportedly deactivated for a total of 11 Minutes. Twitter quickly responded by saying that it was a Human Error committed by an employee on his last day of work. Whoever that employee was, he sure had a lot of guts to deactivate the Presidents beloved Twitter account.
Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
He was a contractor and not an employee
Twitter, in its defense, said that the deactivation was because of "a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day”. But Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi of New York Times reported that the person who did it was actually not a full-time Twitter employee but rather only a contractor. This made Twitter look very bad as how can a contractor have the authority or even the accessibility to be able to deactivate the account of the United States.
The Independent then asked Twitter on who actually has to authority to deactivate accounts, but Twitter never responded to the question. New York Times added that numerous Twitter employees do have authority to deactivate almost anyone on Twitter.
The man is now known as 'The Legend'
Casey Newton of The Verge has reported that on Thursday, current and former Twitter employees gathered in a meeting to discuss the incident.
The employee still has not yet been identified but one former Twitter employee said that everyone is now calling him "The Legend". He also added that they were not surprised at what happened as numerous ex-Twitter employees in the past have abused their power on their last day of work to tamper with deleted accounts and active verified users.
Luckily, the abuse was directly unraveled and did not become public.
The Legend should get a lawyer
While most of the netizens on Twitter applauded what the ex-Twitter employee did some think that he should quickly hire a lawyer so that he can quickly defend himself when the need arises. Alexandra Wiltes of the Independent has reported that there is a big chance the person could have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Our law explicitly states that unauthorized/forceful use of a “protected” computer system is against the law. Tor Ekeland a prominent cybersecurity lawyer added that the employee might be in trouble. This was not just unauthorized access, but also damage to the President of the United States.
