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It holds nuclear missile codes, it's in charge of the security of the United States, and its ultimate boss, the US president, is a prolific tweeter. But when it comes to handling its own Twitter account, the Pentagon could do with improving its skills.

On Thursday the US Department of Defense accidentally retweeted a tweet calling for Donald Trump to resign as US president.

The original tweet which also called for two other US politicians to step down following sexual harassment allegations was tweeted from an account belonging to @ProudResister, an anti-Trump activist.

It said: "The solution is simple. Roy Moore: Step down from the race. Al Franken: Resign from congress, Donald Trump: Resign from the presidency. GOP: Stop making sexual assault a partisan issue. It's a crime as is your hypocrisy."

The Pentagon's main account retweeted the message to its 5.2 million followers before quickly deleting it. But the embarrassing blunder did not go unnoticed. A screen shot of the Pentagon's retweet was itself retweeted and shared, and the reaction to it was swift.

"Uh someone made a mistake," posted one Twitter user.

Another user tweeted: "Looks like that ex-Twitter employee found a new gig at the Pentagon," referring to a similar social media blunder earlier this month when a Twitter employee deactivated President Trump's account on their last day in the job.

At the time, the president brushed off the 11-minute Twitter outage, but the incident raised questions about the security of President Trump's account.

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Chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana White tweeted an explanation of how the post got out to its followers.

But many social media users were dissatisfied by the response.

"Are we supposed to believe this was done by mistake? Somebody in @DeptofDefense needs to be fired along with anybody working with them," posted one Twitter user.

However, another saw the funny side and tweeted a joke response from the Pentagon: "There has been no coup. The President is safe."

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