Everyone’s Celebrating the Hero Twitter Employee Who Took Down Trump’s Account

Yesterday, for several shining, glorious minutes, we got to feel what it would be like to live in the brightest timeline, and it was everything we hoped it would be. Briefly, with no warning or explanation, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was wiped from the face of the Earth and replaced with a blissful lack of enraged, poorly spelled projection.

Donald Trump has made use of Twitter for years—a fact that comes back to bite him with surprising regularity—but for most of that time, no one really paid much attention to yet another angry man putting his ignorance on full display on the internet. Then, the 2016 election happened, and suddenly he was, in a highly “unpresidented [sic]” manner, tweeting directives, government policy, and demands that his political opponents be investigated that we all, sadly, need to take seriously—despite what out-of-touch or willfully ignorant people might think about modern communication technology.

There are easy arguments to be made that he’s violated Twitter’s terms of service with some of the awful things he’s tweeted, including his antagonistic tweets towards North Korea, but Twitter has, so far, made excuses for allowing him to remain active. All that finally led a currently unnamed Twitter employee, who was on their way out of the company anyway, to take matters into their own hands and do what no one else at the company seems to have the good sense to do. That’s not entirely surprising, considering they, along with other tech giants, are demonstrably unconcerned about the societal impacts of their platform, as long as they’re making money. Among other things like a history of ignoring abuse for profit, their testimony before Congress, about election interference, has made that obvious.

So when someone briefly fixed one of the biggest things wrong with social media, even only for a few minutes, the response was fairly strong:

But it was back in short order, because all good things must end:

And as Twitter scrambled on damage control, we finally found out about the rogue employee responsible:

Twitter is now doing a full internal review to find out how something could go so right on their platform, because they can’t have that. But … maybe there’s a reason we don’t think it’s a great idea for the president to regularly conduct government business over a social media platform.

Meanwhile, the Republican tax plan is terrible.

(image: Ildar vector / Shutterstock.com & edits)

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Dan Van Winkle

Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct Geekosystem (RIP), and then at The Mary Sue starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at Smash Bros.

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