In an embarrassing gaffe, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was suspended from his own platform last night, prompting some jibes from lesser-known Twitter users.
The suspension lasted around ten minutes, and Dorsey tweeted after his account was restored to explain that the incident was “an internal mistake”.
As a consequence of the ban, Dorsey’s follower count took a steep dive, plummeting from almost four million down to virtually none. Twitter’s wittier users were quick to revel in the CEO’s suspension, with an avalanche of jokes at Dorsey’s expense.
Although his follower count quickly started approaching its previous levels, the Twitter co-founder hasn’t quite regained his full status. At the time of writing, Dorsey had less than 2.7 million followers, more than 1.2 million fewer than he did before.
The unexpected suspension follows a month in which social media has been under intense scrutiny. President-elect Donald Trump used Twitter heavily during his presidential campaign, and the platform was forced to crack down on hate speech last week, suspending swathes of hate speech activists.
Similarly, Facebook has been in the news over accusations that fake and misleading news that was spread over Facebook contributed to Trump’s surprise win. Facebook and Google have both promised to do more to fight this phenomenon, with Zuckerberg promising better anti-spam algorithms to weed out false news.
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