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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."
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.
Exactly opposite, though: It's not a new law. It's an interpretation of an old law to see if it applies to something new. And it did. Thus we DON'T need new laws.
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!"
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'd be curious to know what there is to deliberate about. Why wouldn't the White House archive all non-classified records and communications?
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.
Actually, tweets would be challenging to archive compared to traditional texts. The hardest part of archiving is creating a good index and cross-references to the archived material. Most even short traditional documents have some sort of natural outlining and some sort of built in summary with keywords in it, like an abstract or executive summary.
A tweet, however, might be best described by keywords that do not even exist in it but rather only by the material it links to or even just the events surrounding it. It may therefore require far more metadata, in words, to describe the significance of a short statement than the statement itself.