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President Obama just got his own Twitter account

by Andrew Prokop
Andrew Prokop
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

President Obama announced Monday that he’d signed up for his own Twitter account — @POTUS.

The account is indeed verified with one of Twitter’s blue checkmarks. It’s been gaining followers at an extraordinary pace (62,000 between 11:44 am and 11:58 am).

Did you think Obama was already on Twitter? Well, before this, Obama would occasionally "sign" tweets from the staff-run @WhiteHouse account and @BarackObama campaign account with his initials to verify that those particular tweets were from him personally, rather than from his staff. The @POTUS account will be the first one with only the president's own words, the administration claims.

Currently, Obama’s new account follows various White House staffers, Cabinet officials, government agencies, sports teams he likes, and institutions of higher education that he attended.

White House staffer Alex Wall has tweeted that the @POTUS account will be passed on to Obama’s successor.

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