How Twitter will transition presidential accounts after Inauguration Day

Twitter has revealed more details about how it will transition official White House accounts when President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are sworn into office on January 20th. The institutional accounts that will be transferred to the Biden administration include @POTUS, @VP, @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS, @PressSec and @LaCasaBlanca.

The current versions of those will be archived under different names, including all of the tweets, and Twitter will transfer them to the National Archives and Records Administration. When Barack Obama left office in 2017, the then @POTUS account was archived as @POTUS44. Similarly, the Trump administration's @POTUS account will live on as @POTUS45.

Several accounts from the Biden camp will then take over those usernames. Twitter will convert @Transition46 to @WhiteHouse, @PresElectBiden to @POTUS and so on. One username that won't make the transition is @SecondLady. Instead, Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff, will use an account called @SecondGentleman. Twitter will archive @SecondLady as @SecondLady45, and the current handle won’t be in use for the time being.

Unlike the 2017 transition, the new versions of those institutional handles won't automatically hang on to their existing followers. If you follow any of those accounts, or the Biden camp ones that will be converted, you'll see alerts and prompts about the switch, along with the option to follow the new versions.

Live streams of the inauguration ceremony will be available through Twitter's US Elections Hub, as well as the @JCCIC and @BidenInaugural accounts. The hub will include lists, moments and recommendations of accounts to follow.