By Aakriti Bhalla
(Reuters) – Twitter Inc will transfer control of the @POTUS account to the Joe Biden administration on Jan. 20, the company said.
The @POTUS account is the official account of the President of the United States and is separate from the @realDonaldTrump account that President Donald Trump uses to tweet.
“Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021. As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the National Archives and Records,” the company confirmed to Reuters on Saturday.
Twitter will also hand over other White House institutional accounts, like @FLOTUS, @VP, and @whitehouse, on inauguration day.
The development was reported earlier by Politico which added that the handover of the @POTUS handle requires no sharing of information between the outgoing Trump team and incoming Biden team.
It also reported that Twitter will meet transition officials of Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the coming months to discuss the particulars of how the new administration will use Twitter.
Biden, who has reached the two-week mark since becoming president-elect, is preparing to take office on Jan. 20, but Trump has refused to concede and is seeking to invalidate or overturn the results through lawsuits and recounts in a number of states, claiming – without proof – widespread voter fraud.
(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
