With the mistakes and politicization of this tweet, I can tell you one thing: civil servants are no longer in charge of this account. That matters...because of the election. https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1302408992464023552

since their development, @statedept accounts, and other institutional accounts have been in the hands of civil servants. This ensured they were consistent, followed all the rules we were making up, and not political. Steadily over the past few years, we've seen that change.

Passwords have been taken by political bosses and content is run through political leaders, not subject matter experts, lawyers and security personnel (yes, friends, each tweet is A Situation in normal land).

As a result of the politicization of these accounts, you can expect them to be used to elect--or shape the impression of the outcome--of the election.

This is of course illegal, but really, are they going to be sent to Twitter jail?

One critical step every person who watches every agency is make sure they know these accounts are in the hands of civil servants, and if not, we publicize it, like I'm doing with @StateDept.

Certainly mistakes are made on Twitter by the @StateDept team, but they would NEVER confuse the International Criminal Court with the International Cricket Council. (and they'd caution about the attack dog approach and the intention of where that was supposed to go for policy)

I no longer consider @StateDept to be an official representation of US policy. It is a political mouthpiece. I'm sad about that, and sad for friends who built it. But calling attention to these realities are important for the public discourse, especially around the election.

There's space for journalists to do a proper accounting of who is empowered to post on behalf of USG institutional accounts: a civil servant or a Trump appointee. We all need to know the reality of what we're seeing.