As you may remember, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, had his overactive and alarming Twitter account very briefly deactivated at the beginning of this month. There was much rejoicing.
I was there for the great vanishing of Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Nov 2, 2017.
— Justin Jacobs (@justinjacobs) November 2, 2017
If Trump’s Twitter account did in fact get deleted, that would be the first bit of good news we’ve gotten in a while.
— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) November 2, 2017
If Trump’s Twitter is down, does this technically mean he’s no longer POTUS? I mean, it’s the only part of the job he pays attention to.
— John Schindler (@20committee) November 2, 2017
https://twitter.com/monicapatel917/status/926222363158511616
And then, when it emerged that the cause of the deactivation was a disgruntled employee shooting his shot on his very last day at Twitter, there was practically pandemonium.
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
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
No joke, the internet has nominated the Twitter employee who shut down Trump’s account for a Nobel Peace Prize
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) November 6, 2017
We all wanted to know who the give-no-fucks hero was who deleted the President’s account before, we assume, setting his desk on fire and walking out while putting sunglasses on.
And now we know.
Thanks to a fascinating interview by TechCrunch, the identity of the hero of 2017 has been revealed as German bloke Bahtiyar Duysak. He was a contractor for Twitter towards the end of his stay in the States on a work/study visa, and he worked in the department that received reports of bad behaviour or violation of terms of service – basically, if you flagged an account, Duysak was one of the people who’d see your alert and choose whether or not to act on it.
And that’s exactly what he did.
In the very last moments of his tenure at Twitter, Duysak reportedly received a complaint about Trump’s account. He effectively shrugged, hit the big red button, and shut his computer down.
He later told TechCrunch that he did not think the account would actually be deactivated, and that he does not feel like a hero – particularly as the media have been absolutely hounding him ever since.
He’s now returned to Germany, where he gave the interview to TechCrunch, and despite not feeling like the hero that we’ve all been waiting for, is absolutely adamant that he didn’t actually do anything wrong.
I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything that I was not authorised to do. I didn’t go to any site I was not supposed to go to. I didn’t break any rules.
We’re with you, mate. Keep on fighting the good fight.