A Twitter employee who was working his last day at the company deactivated President Trump's account, shuttering it for eleven minutes before they were able to restore it.

The company claimed that the deactivation was "inadvertent."

Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump's @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was "inadvertently deactivated" due to human error by a Twitter Inc employee on Thursday and was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said.

"We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support employee who did this on the employee's last day. We are conducting a full internal review," Twitter said in a tweet.

"We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again," the company said in an earlier tweet.

A Twitter representative declined to comment further.

"Inadvertent"?  "Human error"?  If you believe that, I've got a bridge over the Chicago River I can sell you.

Since you – and most others – are not that stupid, we must assume that the employee deactivated the president's Twitter account deliberately.  That some low-level customer service flunkie can shut down any account, much less that of the president, is extremely troubling.  It's not that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites have been successful in hiding their antipathy to conservatives and Republicans – far from it.  But it's one thing to delete a few tweets.  It's quite another to deactivate an account.

If it wasn't the president's account, but rather that of an ordinary conservative or Republican, would they have noticed in eleven minutes?  Would they have bothered to do anything about it at all?

Given the enormous power of Twitter and social media to affect politics, users should demand at least the appearance of non-partisanship.  But that's not likely, given past behavior.