On November 3rd, 2017 for 11 minutes, Donald Trump’s Twitter account disappeared. Some celebrated the occasion — now Trump couldn’t instigate a nuclear war with North Korea, spread fake news while decrying reputable sources, start feuds, or spread anti-Muslim videos shared by right wing extremists. Meanwhile, others were wondering what could’ve had Trump banned from the medium (beyond instigating nuclear war). It turned out that POTUS did nothing. It was the work of a lone contractor named Bahtiyar Duysak on his last day of work. A guy, who, for 660 seconds, was a god amongst men.
Now, TechCrunch has found Duysak, who moved back to Germany after studying in California. The story of the Turkish/German man’s final day of work that’s now become legend seemed typical enough. Duysak explained to TechCrunch that he worked in customer service and received complaints about Trump’s Twitter account. So in the last hour of his last day, Duysak seemed to escalate the ticket until it snowballed into Trump’s deactivation.
Duysak called the deactivation a mistake, mostly due to Twitter’s insistence that Trump’s tweets are not violating any terms of service since they are newsworthy. He told TechCrunch that he isn’t concerned about any repercussions, despite news outlets aggressively looking for his information and contact his friends and family:
“I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything that I was not authorized to do. I didn’t go to any site I was not supposed to go to. I didn’t break any rules”
As Duysak says in the TechCrunch interview from Germany, he feels either lucky or unlucky that this even happened. Lucky in the sense that it wasn’t supposed to happen, it was sheer luck that Trump’s account shut down, and unlucky that he’s had to delete hundreds of friends from his social media accounts due to being “stalked” by reporters. “I didn’t do any crime or anything evil, but I feel like Pablo Escobar and slowly it’s getting really annoying.”
It’s death via a thousand papercuts for Duysak, and 280 characters for most people in the world.
(Via TechCrunch)