With a president who has trained the world to treat his Twitter feed as the most direct expression of his mind and of the actions he intends to take, that is unacceptable. The Trump team may have safeguards in mind, or cooperate with whatever the folks at the White House Communications Agency recommend. But given the government’s poor track record with information security, there is no reason to leave the matter entirely in their hands. Twitter’s CEO has a responsibility to impose an additional safeguard. And doing so shouldn’t be difficult.
Going forward, the @POTUS account and any verified account belonging to the sitting president should lose the ability to post anything instantaneously to the Internet.
Instead, those accounts should post to a queue. Twitter should then send the tweet in question to a designated official, perhaps White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who will be prompted, “Can you verify that POTUS wants to tweet this?” And 10 seconds or 20 minutes or 2 hours later, with that “authentication” process complete, the tweet could be published to the stream as before.
This approach, or a smarter alternative, would impose trivial costs and could have almost incalculable benefits. And the public would almost certainly support the restriction.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member