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Entertainment February 10, 2017
Donald Trump is known for his no-holds-barred attitude on Twitter, but it turns out his controversial tweets aren’t just upsetting liberals – they’re breaking the site.
An old Twitter glitch has reemerged with the popularity of President Trump’s outrageous tweets.
It turns out the quick fire responses to the Donald’s wild posts have caused the back end of Twitter to short circuit, resulting in tweets being “orphaned” or “disconnected” from the original thread.
This is a problem for users because they get much fewer views when the tweet is sitting alone on their page, than they do when it is connected to a popular thread.
But more importantly, many have begun to worry that the White House is censoring unfavorable tweets about the President.
For example, Twitter user @AJ responded to Trump’s tweet from February 7 – claiming he did not know Vladimir Putin – with a clip from a 2013 interview in which Trump says the exact opposite, that he does have a relationship with the Russian president.
But now that it has been orphaned, it doesn’t even look like a reply. It is merely posted to his own profile with no @ to Donald Trump or anything.
Twitter says the glitch is because too many people are responding to Donald Trump’s controversial tweets.
Senior Engineering Manager Leslie Miley said that it had been a problem Twitter dealt with before, back in 2012-2015.
She told Mashable that Twitter is “probably seeing strains in their architecture that they do not anticipate because Donald Trump, for lack of a better term, is a black swan.”
To understand what she means you have look to at replies. For example, Katy Perry has a lot more followers than Donald Trump – with 95.7 million to his 24.5 million on his personal account and 15.2 million for @POTUS – but she gets far fewer responses.
A popular tweet – 25,000 likes – about her new single garnered 2,000 responses. Meanwhile, Trump’s tweet about the appeals court upholding the block on his travel ban received 210,000 likes and 145,000 replies.
Twitter’s Vice President of Engineering, Ed Ho, has assured Twitter users that it is not censorship but rather a “long standing technical issue.”
They have yet to find a solution to the issue, but for now Ho says they are “working on a fix.”
