Bahtiyar Duysak, the Twitter employee who shut down President Donald Trump’s account in early November, is breaking his silence.
Duysak, who was working as a fixed term contractor at the time of the incident, opened up about what happened during an interview with Tech Crunch published on Wednesday, November 29.
The German technician explained that he had been assigned to work in the customer support region of Twitter’s trust and safety department, which is in charge of monitoring illegal or offensive tweets. On his last day working at Twitter, Duysak received a complaint about 71-year-old Trump’s account. He then carried out the steps to deactivate the account, closed his computer and left the building one last time.
The weight of his actions didn’t sync in until Duysak was approached by a woman soon after asking if he had been linked to the brief deactivation of the commander in chief’s account. Duysak explained to Tech Crunch that the incident was a “mistake” and he never really believed that the account would be taken down as he believed Trump was protected against being deactivated.
“I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything that I was not authorized to do,” he told the website. “I didn’t go to any site I was not supposed to go to. I didn’t break any rules.”
As previously reported, Twitter issued a statement after Duysak briefly silenced Trump. “Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee,” the company tweeted at the time. “The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored.”
After completing an internal investigation, Twitter revealed the following day that the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”
Trump weighed in on the incident soon after. “My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee,” he wrote on the social networking platform. “I guess the word must finally be getting out – and having an impact.”
