Joe Biden Has a New Twitter Account

A big transition will be happening on Twitter as well as in the White House on Wednesday. President-elect Joe Biden was on Friday issued the Twitter account @PresElectBiden, and it will become the @POTUS account at 12:01pm on Jan. 20, the BBC reports. Unlike when Barack Obama's official account transferred to President Trump's control four years ago, Biden has to start from scratch. As of this writing, Biden had more than 570,000 followers on the new account. Twitter says the 33 million followers of the @POTUS account and other official accounts will be given prompts after the transition giving them the option to follow the new administration's accounts, but they won't be transferred automatically.

Trump automatically inherited Obama's 13 million followers in the last transition, and Biden's team has complained about the change in policy. "There is value in being able to communicate with an audience that doesn’t agree with us," digital director Rob Flaherty tells Bloomberg. In a blog post Thursday, Twitter listed other transitions that will happen Wednesday: @Transition46 will become @WhiteHouse, @SenKamalaHarris will become @VP, @FLOTUSBiden will become @FLOTUS, and @PressSecPsaki will become @PressSec. Twitter said Trump's official account will be archived as @POTUS45. The BBC notes that Twitter didn't say whether it will archive the @realdonaldtrump account Trump is now permanently banned from using, but the National Archives says it will preserve the account's now-deleted posts. (More Joe Biden stories.)