News Analysis |
On 2nd November 2017, the world was a quieter place for 11 minutes as the notorious twitter handle of the President of the United States Donald Trump was shut down as a parting gift to the world by a Twitter employee on his last day at work. Journalists all over the world set out on a quest to find out this unsung hero for many. Apparently, Elvis has been found.
A man named Bahtiyar Duysak claims he was the Twitter employee who deactivated Trump’s account for 11 blissful minutes earlier this month. Mr. Duysak is not a US citizen and no longer resides in the United States. Shockingly, the former Twitter employee describes the situation as “a mistake.”
A number of coincidences, perhaps, might not have led to the shutdown of the of the President’s notorious Twitter account, but we’ll have to make do with Mr. Duysak’s explanation for now.
When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, @realdonaldtrump, disappeared from the site around 7 PM ET, it was not clear as to what had happened to the account, and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment by media outlets.
After the restoration of the account, Twitter’s government and elections team responded in a series of tweets by first blaming “human error” and subsequently explaining that this step was taken by a rogue employee who was on his last day at work and saw it as an opportunity to rid the free world of the outspoken and eccentric Twitter account of the President of the United States.
Read more: Trump fires back at British PM after she criticized his recent…
Bahtiyar Duysak stayed quiet through most of the month, but responding to what can only be assumed as peer pressure or the urge to accept the award, he has come forward with his interview with TechCrunch’s, an American online publication dedicated to technology news and events around the world.
Mr. Duysak, elaborating on his ‘mistake’, told the publication that it was shortly before the end of his last day working in Twitter’s department that handles reports of bad behavior when a report on Trump’s Twitter account came in. Almost subconsciously, Duysak went ahead and set the procedures in motion to deactivate the account, not believing that it could actually be the President’s account, TechCrunch reports.
After Mr. Duysak went public with his version of the story, Twitter was approached by Business Insider, another US-based online publication, to comment. A Twitter spokesperson responded.
Since @therealdonaldtrump is Mr.Trump’s personal Twitter handle, it is not protected by government laws and extra security layers as @POTUS. He closed his computer and left Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for good, Mr. Duysak said. He believed there were protections in place to protect this account and other high profile accounts like it.
Several hours later, he discovered it was actually deactivated when a woman he knew approached him asking about the situation. She had apparently been contacted by someone who had been trying to track him down and since then journalists who suspected he was the employee responsible had been combing through his life trying to reach him and contacting everyone and anyone from his college friends to his family trying to gain access to him, he said.
Read more: McDonald’s tweets at Trump: ‘A disgusting excuse of a President’
Now that he’s back in his home country of Germany, Mr. Duysak said that he decided to come forward and speak to the press so he could get back to an “ordinary life. I don’t want to have to keep fleeing from the media.”
After Mr. Duysak went public with his version of the story, Twitter was approached by Business Insider, another US-based online publication, to comment. A Twitter spokesperson responded:
Mr. Duysak, elaborating on his ‘mistake’, told the publication that it was shortly before the end of his last day working in Twitter’s department that handles reports of bad behavior when a report on Trump’s Twitter account came in.
“We won’t have a comment on a former employee. We have taken a number of steps to keep an incident like this from happening again. In order to protect our internal security measures we don’t have further details to share at this time.”
While Mr. Duysak has indeed come clean, his version of the story does not fully elaborate the troubling incident. It’s not really clear, for instance, why Duysak initiated the process to deactivate Trump’s account if he didn’t believe it would actually do anything.
Read more: Trump tweets thanks to Pakistan
Instead of a proper explanation for his actual motives, he offered only a cryptic insert:
“It’s all about a number of coincidences, with very, very little probabilities that randomly occurred on my last day”. A number of coincidences, perhaps, might not have led to the shutdown of the of the President’s notorious Twitter account, but we’ll have to make do with Mr. Duysak’s explanation for now.