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."

Re:It's on the internet

[LostCluster]

The law usually gets blindsided by technical developments. Giving the lack of tech experts in lawmaking, they usually try to apply the old regulation until they break, then and only then do they realize there's a new way to do things.

Re:It's on the internet

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:Bureaucracy gone mad

[LostCluster]

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!"

It seems kind of pointless

[mysidia]

Tweets are public in the first place, and can't really be withdrawn.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.

Re:What are you tweeting about....

[drinkypoo]

If he's just tweeting what he had for lunch, there's no reason to keep that around.

Unless it turns out to have been code for something, which is why you archive EVERYTHING.

Re:which prompts the question

[18_Rabbit]

Apparently you've been missing for the past 8 1/2 years. The Bush administration was using non-official email accounts to conduct official business, 'cause, you know, they never wanted anyone to know what they were doing.

Re:Bureaucracy gone mad

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:It seems kind of pointless

[pavon]

Just because something can be archived by everyone, doesn't mean that someone will. Otherwise we wouldn't be missing all those old BBC episodes for which the originals were destroyed.

Re:The National Archives are going to love this

[KibibyteBrain]

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.