Biden starts Presidential Twitter account from ‘zero’, gets over 500k followers in half a day

US President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday started his new, official presidential account on Twitter. However, in line with Twitter’s new policy on incoming leaders' Twitter accounts, Biden’s new started with zero followers.

Earlier today, Biden tweeted from the handle @PresElectBiden, which had around 5,000 followers within the first half an hour of his new account’s existence on the platform - within half a day, that number shot up to 5,36,516 at the time of publishing this story.

Biden’s new Twitter handle is only temporary - on Inauguration day on January 20, this account will transform into @POTUS, while outgoing President Donald Trump’s tweets will be officially archived under the handle @POTUS45. Trump had inherited his predecessor Obama’s 13 million followers when he took office in January 2017.

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Meanwhile, Biden’s first - and only tweet so far - stated that the account was for his official duties as President and that he would be using his own Twitter account @JoeBiden until the inauguration on January 20. He also urged his followers to follow his wife and future First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, her husband Douglas Emhoff, and the official account of the Biden-Harris presidential transition.

While Biden’s team was initially unhappy with the decision of the social media company to implement the new rule that any incoming world leader would not inherit their predecessor’s followers, it looks like Biden’s account will easily touch the one million mark before the day is over.

While Twitter has not specified any official reason for the change in policy in their blog post about the company’s plans for Inauguration Day 2021, which stated that “institutional accounts will not automatically retain the followers from the prior administration.” The company has stated that Twitter users who followed the POTUS account would receive in-app alerts and other prompts informing them about the archival and give them an option to follow the new administration’s Twitter accounts.