On Thursday, Donald Trump’s Twitter went missing. (My first thought? FINALLY!!!) But it came back quickly, and Twitter offered an explanation:
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
No one in Trump town believed them, and of course people told Trump town not to be paranoid. But then …
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
There are two takeaways here. The first, like Patterico, is to praise the deletion. Trump’s tweets are a very real, and very serious problem. Patterico puts this right into perspective.
The second, though, is the unavoidable fact of the activist act. This employee, in what any fair reading of Twitter’s second tweet sounds like a deliberate act, has made a pretty significant decision (not to mention a heroic stab at their 15 minutes) to undertake an act of perceived civil disobedience (not actual civil disobedience since Twitter is a private company, of course), or #resistance, and will be praised for it. Is being praised for it.
Hell, might even get rich off it.
Ok if this ex-Twitter employee needs to do COBRA let’s all chip in ok?
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 3, 2017
NRO’s Dan McLaughlin, formerly of RedState, proposes flipping the script for a moment.
Thought experiment: rogue Twitter employee deletes Obama's account, right-wing sources offer to raise money for him after he's fired. https://t.co/tUi6Hgg5ek
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 3, 2017
Twitter still has their “internal review” to conduct.
Still, Patterico’s point is more than well-taken. Trump’s tweets are not good for us. They may excite his base, and keep the media in ratings, but inasmuch as they frequently undermine his own staff, and perhaps now even terror cases, they are not good for Americans. One imagines (hopes) some of the inner circle know that. As Joe put it:
How much did John Kelly pay that Twitter employee?
— Joe Cunningham (@JoePCunningham) November 3, 2017
Once again, in other words, everybody involved in politics is a bad guy, to one degree or another.
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