Twitter boss explains why thousands of users were signed up to follow Donald Trump automatically

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly accepted that roughly 560,000 were affected by an Inauguration Day error that saw users end up following Donald Trump's new Twitter account without consent.

Dorsey has claimed that "Because @POTUS is an institutional account (not personal) they felt it only fair to transition accounts with followers intact, but 0 tweets." This meant that many people who had not signed up to follow Donald Trump on Twitter ended up following him anyway after the account changed hands. The same also happened with regards Vice President Mike Pence and Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Not only people who followed the previous POTUS and VP accounts were affected — many who has previously followed Obama's POTUS account and had later unfollowed it were forced to re-follow the account under Trump's name. In many cases, notifications were also enabled without the permission of Twitter users. Dorsey has taken to his own Twitter to clarify the issue, and apologise, writing "We're sorry for the mistakes we've made here, and thank you all." https://twitter.com/jack/status/822875525198860289 https://twitter.com/jack/status/822876560139100160 https://twitter.com/jack/status/822876781631901698 https://twitter.com/jack/status/822877334839721988 Catch up with this week's episode of 888sport Football Friday Live: