Tweets and other electronic communications by presidents are considered public property under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Tweets from President Barack Obama and other officials from his administration were preserved by the National Archive online, and it said it has tracked Trump’s throughout his time in office.
Facebook expects a “seamless” transition of the relevant Facebook and Instagram accounts to the new administration, the company said in a statement emailed to The Post: “In 2017, we worked with both the Obama Administration and incoming Trump Administration to make sure the transition of their Facebook and Instagram accounts was seamless on January 20th, and we expect to do same here.”
On Twitter, the @POTUS account is separate from the account that Trump tweets from so prolifically and that has come to define his presidency. His personal account, @realDonaldTrump, has been his primary megaphone to air his grievances and opine on trade deals, national security, the election and other topics. He is one of Twitter’s most influential figures, with nearly 89 million followers. He has tweeted more than 58,000 times.
Trump’s tweets often come with real reverberations, particularly in the financial world. A Bank of America analysis from September 2019 found that, since 2016, days on which the president tweeted more than 35 times were associated with negative market returns. A Barron’s analysis, also from September 2019, calculated that the S&P 500 fell an average of 0.3 percent on days when Trump tweeted more than 20 times.
JPMorgan analysts created a “Volfefe index” — a mash-up of volatility and Trump’s 2017 “covfefe” Twitter garble — to track the relationship between the president’s tweets and Treasury yields. Earlier this year, the index signaled that volatility in the Treasury market linked to Trump’s tweets surpassed those linked to traditional sources of monetary and economic policy announcements, Bloomberg reported.
In recent weeks, Trump’s tirades over the election results and false claims of mass voter fraud have repeatedly been flagged as misinformation. According to Factba.se, 174 of Trump’s tweets have been flagged by Twitter. Just since Saturday, 20 of Trump’s tweets and retweets have been flagged.
In one tweet Sunday, the president claimed that “in certain swing states, there were more votes than people who voted, and in big numbers,” while also alleging “fake ballots” and “egregious conduct.” Fact-checkers have repeatedly investigated viral claims that vote counts exceeded registered voters in various locales and found them all to be false. Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet as being “disputed.”
He has also used the platform to make big announcements, including firings. Last week, he fired Christopher Krebs, the top Department of Homeland Security official charged with election security, after he publicly contradicted Trump’s baseless claims that the November election was stolen. Krebs ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, which helps state and local election offices protect their systems and rebut misinformation.
