Cal State Hayward graduate who 'admires' Trump deactivated president's account by 'mistake': reports
Bahtiyar Duysak speaks to a TechCrunch reporter in Germany.
A 28-year-old Cal State Hayward graduate who was lauded by progressives as the next nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize is the man behind taking down President Trump’s Twitter account for 11 minutes -- but he did it sort of by mistake, TechCrunch first reported.
Reporters at TechCrunch identified the Twitter-contractor as Bahtiyar Duysak, who was born in Turkey and raised in Germany. He was working for the San Francisco company for the last part of his stay in the United States under a work-study visa.
He was an international student at Cal State University East Bay in Hayward and received a certificate in International Business, a ccording to the school. BuzzFeed reported he also has a master's in banking and finance from University of Birmingham in England.
Duysak told TechCruch he worked in customer support in Twitter’s Trust and Safety division. This team receives alerts when users report bad behavior, including offensive or illegal tweets, harassment, someone impersonating another person and so on. The team then gets to decide what further steps, if any, should be taken.
On his last day at Twitter, Nov. 2, someone reported Trump’s account to him, and he decided in a “throwaway gesture,” TechCrunch described, to “put the wheels in motion to deactivate it. Then he left work.
It was hours later that he realized what he had done, through the news.
He told “TechCrunch” it was a “mistake,” he never thought the account would actually get activated. He told TechCrunch he is sure he didn’t break any laws or hack anyone’s account.
"I was tired," he said in the interview, which was conducted in Germany. "It was a mistake....it was a number of coincidences."
He also says he's been stalked by the media.
In a separate interview, he told CNNTech that he actually “admires” Trump's business acumen and he should not be considered a hero. "I don't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize," he told TechCrunch
Twitter would not confirm to TechCrunch Duysak’s identity.
But day after the deactivation, Twitter said it was conducting a full internal review and implementing safeguards to prevent incidents like this in the future.