Yet Mr. Trump’s deleted account showed how empty some of those promises seemed. Late Thursday, Twitter employees gathered in private Slack channels and used Twitter to send direct messages to one another to remark on how insecure Mr. Trump’s account had been, according to people involved in the conversations. Hundreds of employees can access the accounts of so-called Very Important Tweeters and can take actions like disabling the accounts, according to the current and former employees.
A Twitter spokeswoman referred to the company’s earlier remarks, noting it was conducting an internal investigation into the matter. On Friday, the company tweeted that it had added new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the incident, and said it would not be able to share all the details of its investigation.
Mr. Trump, for his part, remarked that the incident reflected the impact his Twitter messages have had. He tweeted with gusto on Friday, firing off more than a dozen messages over the course of the day on issues including ISIS and Hillary Clinton.
The discovery that it was a contractor who deleted Mr. Trump’s account is difficult for Twitter, as well as other technology companies. Nearly every major technology company including Google, Facebook and Apple relies on contract employees to fill positions. In general, the jobs tend to be nontechnical roles such as customer support or administrative and operational positions.
Many of these workers are brought on by staffing companies like Accenture, Adecco and Cognizant and work on renewable one-year contracts. Facebook, Twitter and other companies also outsource content review to third-party services like ProUnlimited and Cognizant, which are essentially internet call centers staffed with hundreds of workers who deal with customer service issues.
Many of these people work side by side with full-time employees, but they are often paid significantly less, are identified with different color employee badges, and are not afforded the same perks and amenities that full-time workers have. Many complain of being treated like second-class citizens.
At the congressional hearings this week, Facebook and Twitter had discussed how they planned to hire more people to help prohibit the misuse of their platforms. Facebook said it was hiring an additional 10,000 workers to review flagged content, bringing the total to 20,000 by the end of 2018.
But in a conference call with investors on Wednesday, Facebook said many of the new workers are not likely to be full-time employees; the company will largely rely on third-party contractors.
At Twitter, employees have long expressed concern about the widely available nature of internal tools for handling customer accounts. Disabling an account is typically an easy two- or three-step process, according to current and former Twitter employees. Certain teams at the company — including trust and safety, and operations — have access to all accounts including the highest levels.
Twitter customer support cannot, however, access customers’ private direct messages, nor can it tweet on behalf of other users, these people said.
In the past, Twitter has discussed adding additional layers of security that would prohibit wide internal access to V.I.T. accounts, according to these people. That included a kind of “dual layer” of security, requiring assurances from multiple employees to make significant changes to accounts.
In the end, the company did not follow through with the plans, these people said.
On Friday, Mr. Dorsey tweeted that Twitter was clarifying its rules around what was or was not acceptable on the service. The chief executive sidestepped putting up his own post about President Trump’s missing-then-found account.
Follow Mike Isaac on Twitter @MikeIsaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi @daiwaka
A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Across Twitter, Nary a Trump; Inside Twitter, Prompt Panic.
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