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:What are you tweeting about....

[yuhong]

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.

Yea, like there is a separation between personal and professional these days: http://www.bnet.com/2403-13058_23-358555.html [bnet.com]

which prompts the question

[Eil]

After deliberation, White House Lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

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?

Re:which prompts the question

[JoshuaZ]

Because records have this nasty tendency to bite you when you are trying to change history. The entire reason transparency and archiving laws are important is that even for fairly normal, non-evil people, there are major temptations to just not keep records of stuff that is inconvenient unless there's a specific action to tell you otherwise. Indeed, for all of Obama's talk about transparency during the election, this administration has only be marginally more transparent than the previous administration in many respects.

Re:It seems kind of pointless

[mysidia]

Deleting a tweet draws even more attention to its text when just one of the >100,000 followers noticed the tweet went away

There are entire websites already dedicated to archiving all deleted tweets

I'd be far more concerned about integrity of the message.

For example, what happens if Twitter.com admins decide to alter the text of a tweet during posting, or shortly after it is posted?

Such as to censor bad words, block certain tweets from being published (spam filter), or alteration for selfish commercial purposes (such as adding ad placement to their tweet)

Then the "archived" tweet might not even actually be close to what got published, or might not reflect the version that was the most widely disseminated.