Slashdot Mirror
White House Press Secretary's Tweets Archived
RedTeflon writes "The White House spokesman, who has just started using Twitter, told reporters this afternoon that he met with government lawyers yesterday to determine whether his tweets would be archived along with emails and just about everything else produced at the White House. After deliberation, White House lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
Therefore we need news laws.
A corollary:
It's on the internet. Therefore old laws don't apply.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
It seems to me that public people might need two twitter accounts just to create the legal definition of what they're posting as part of their job (which definitely should be subject to retention policies) and what they're positing as a member of the public. Some notable policies...
MSNBC holds people accountable for what they tweet, such as what got David Schuster in trouble for recently. Basically, you can't say anything on Twitter that they wouldn't allow on the air. Keith Olbermann doesn't tweet. Rachel Maddow tweets but it's mostly limited to show previews and links to her other web posts.
ESPN orders their people not to tweet, seeing it as competition to what they do on the air. No breaking of stories before they're reported by ESPN or ESPN.com. No posting of opinions if you're paid to share your opinions on ESPN shows. If you work for them and want to blog, there's space waiting for you at ESPN.com.
CNN allowed Rick Sanchez to turn his non-distinct hour of CNN Newsroom into a signature show called "Rick's List" where they use "iReports" from people tweeting, facebooking and myspacing them in order to generate content. A consultant who wrote an unofficial bridge between the CNN Breaking News e-mail service and the CNN_brk Twitter account ended up getting a handsome reward for handing over control of the account to make it an official CNN service.
G4 one day sent around a sign-or-you're-fired notice that the on-air staff had to give the network license to republish their tweets from their personal twitter accounts. This is what enabled that little quote box on the right hand side of their webpage and nothing more, but the way it was handled with legalese before explaining what the network really meant caused some initial confusion. More or less, the staff learned not to tweet dumb things because there's a risk that might be something the web editor can grab onto now. The reason Morgan Webb's Webb Alert podcast is "suspended" is because Morgan was told to stop doing that since it competed with the The Feed segment on AOTS which up until recently was also podcast. If G4 ever gives her the green light, or she leaves the network and her new job doesn't mind the podcast is likely to return.
In all these cases, the content owners want to control what their public people tweet with information they learned as part of doing their job. Say things that help the company make money, and keep going. Say things that the bosses think cost the company money, and you'll be told to stop. Bringing this back to the topic at hand... if he's tweeting for his job then his job should keep the tweets. If he's just tweeting what he had for lunch, there's no reason to keep that around.
Basically, he's doing what a normal company would call PR. He really isn't allowed to express his own personal opinion, he's spouting the official opinions of the executive branch of the US Government. Therefore, what he posts should be part of the official records, he shouldn't be allowed to say "I didn't tweet that!"
Look at this on the bright side -- the librarians at the National Archives won't have to strain their backs to lift and catalogue a tiny collection of 140-character messages. Must be a nice break next to the 5,000 page budget proposals they've gotten used to seeing.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Tweets are public in the first place, and can't really be withdrawn.
They aren't tweets until displayed by third-party servers. And displaying them means that they are published...
And anyone can archive them already.
So I question whether it's an efficient use of government resources.
When a politician is answering questions at a press conference... is an archivist scrupulously keeping their own record to be stored in the presidential archives?
Including requiring all members of the press to have their video and notes run through a machine to "archive" it, before they're allowed to leave.
And also... that all articles published also get archived.....
It seems like the things most important to require be archived carefully are the things that aren't published, or contain elements that were not made public at the time.
I, for one, am glad that twitter wasn't around when Clinton was president.
tmi about Clinton already, what happens at the next scandal?
How do you tweet a stupid smirk?
I'd be curious to know what there is to deliberate about. Why wouldn't the White House archive all non-classified records and communications?
He really isn't allowed to express his own personal opinion
Yea, I still remember an incident, like that make sense these days: http://www.bnet.com/2403-13058_23-358555.html (This one is about Facebook photos, but I'd say the same about personal opinions too)
Are they seriously going to bother archiving his 140-character ramblings? Why would anyone ever find it necessary to lookup one of the stupid little messages the White House spokesperson has left to his followers?
Recording everything is important precisely because we don't always know what is important now. In 30 years these could help provide valuable insight to how the Obama administration communicated with the public. Or if there is some claim of illegal behavior, his tweets could help establish where he and others in the administration were at specific times. Sure, neither of those two seem that likely. But the point is that we don't know. Since archiving takes very little resources, it makes sense to archive pretty much everything.
Hope they expand it to defense and state dept. Think of the hilarity of international diplomacy via twitter smirks.
Yeah. Pwnage, loots, and all that.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"And this affects me how?"
with the full backing and support of the president. Why are we even talking about this?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
What? You are a twat. 1. yesterdays XKCD 2. "30 years from now?" 3. "Random claims of whereabouts?"
there's a certain amount of ego going on. for example, nixon made a point to have all of his white house discussions taped, down to the most mundane stuff, like where he would eat for dinner, but where he also freely and many times said extremely sensitive things. its aggrandizement: "i'm so important, let's tape everything i say so historians of the future can hang on my every word"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html
ah that wacky nixon. i wonder what if tweets today will look equally crude in the future
the nazis and the east german stasi were fanatically meticulous record keepers. pol pot and the soviets kept voluminous records. the chinese commnist party and iran's military junta are studious record takers
so when you say " there are major temptations to just not keep records of stuff that is inconvenient unless there's a specific action to tell you otherwise", i assert the exact opposite is true. there's no impulse to hide anything. in fact, the impulse is to record everything
this is because the impulse to hide something is to assume someone thinks they are doing something wrong. but at the highest echelons of power, in any country, in any era, you are not talking about people with small egos. and no one up there thinks they are doing anything wrong. and in fact, many rulers in the heights of power pretty much think they decide what right and wrong is. they got that high in power for a reason: they firmly believe the absolute justification of their beliefs. you don't climb the rungs of power if you have misgivings and secret doubts, that just drains your drive to succeed
therefore, no rulers see record keeping as a threat. in fact, many of them see record keeping as just good business: future writers of future history books need to know what great thoughts they were thinking at the time and how bright is the sunlight that shines out of their asshole: a nod to the future glorification of their wonderous legacy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And so we now have found what will finally be the death of most social media outlets, including Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook...Lawyers.
I can see it now..."Anything you can say, might have said, or will say, regardless of format, will be held against you. We have the right to refuse you a job based on that pic you posted when you were 16. We also retain the right to fire you for anything WE deem "offensive" in nature that is done by you, on or off duty, that we discover at a later date. We reserve the right to inform future employers..."
Having a hard time believing that? The term "hostile work environment" didn't hardly exist a couple of decades ago, and look at the billions generated from sexual harassment lawsuits since then.
One of the hard things about archiving these tweets is ... do they get to archive the tweets that his tweets may be in reply to? How do they verify a bit.ly link actually pointed to what the expanded URL archived claimed to be? These are 140 character type-bites! There's no space to have internal context - the majority of their meaning is in all the tweets they reply to, and that reply to them!