Technical glitch forces users to follow Donald Trump, Twitter apologises

A technical glitch forced hundreds of thousands of people to follow US President Donald Trump on Twitter. The social networking site later apologised to users for the forced follow.

The control of @POTUS handle was handed to the new President Trump after he took the oath of office at Friday's inauguration.

Some users unfollowed @POTUS as soon as the control went to Trump from former President Barack Obama. However, the users automatically re-followed the account without their permission.

After noticing the glitch, some users brought it to the notice of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The Twitter CEO acknowledged the “mistakes” in the process that caused users who unfollowed the POTUS account to follow it without opting to do so.

He explained in a series of tweets that users who followed President Obama's new handle -- @POTUS44 -- after noon on Friday were automatically set to follow the Trump-run @POTUS handle.

In addition, "some people who unfollowed @POTUS in the past were mistakenly marked to now follow @POTUS," Dorsey said via Twitter. "This also affected other official Administration accounts like @VP, @WhiteHouse, and @PressSec."

All: we investigated what happened here, and we made some mistakes (which have been corrected). Some context first. https://t.co/W1n3Xs6LaN

— jack (@jack) January 21, 2017

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"We believe this affected about 560,000 people. This was a mistake, it wasn't right, we own it, and we apologise. No excuses," he tweeted.
Dorsey said the issue has been corrected, CNN reported.

(With inputs from PTI)