What the Feds Must Archive
I'm curious what people made of these sentences in the White House explanation of Social Media practices:
The White House is not archiving all content or activity across social networks where we have a page – nor do we want to. The only content archived is what is voluntarily published on the White House’s official pages on these sites or what is voluntarily sent to a White House account.
A very respected analyst took those comments and offered this commentary:
The above implies that anything published on an external social network is not to be considered as a public record. On the contrary, any statement, any comment, any change made on the government web real estate is subject to records management rules.
...
In other terms, talking on external social media, government organizations and their employees are “off the records”, while on their web sites they are “on the records”. Still they need to meet the obligations of their codes of conduct, but clearly there is much more room for maneuver on a non-government social media site.
I'm a little concerned that someone in my state might hear of this practice and think he or she has to archive their blog if it's on the city web site, but not if it's hosted on Blogger. Can someone help me understand what what Macon Phillips was saying in the first quote?
The White House is not archiving all content or activity across social networks where we have a page – nor do we want to. The only content archived is what is voluntarily published on the White House’s official pages on these sites or what is voluntarily sent to a White House account.
A very respected analyst took those comments and offered this commentary:
The above implies that anything published on an external social network is not to be considered as a public record. On the contrary, any statement, any comment, any change made on the government web real estate is subject to records management rules.
...
In other terms, talking on external social media, government organizations and their employees are “off the records”, while on their web sites they are “on the records”. Still they need to meet the obligations of their codes of conduct, but clearly there is much more room for maneuver on a non-government social media site.
I'm a little concerned that someone in my state might hear of this practice and think he or she has to archive their blog if it's on the city web site, but not if it's hosted on Blogger. Can someone help me understand what what Macon Phillips was saying in the first quote?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lisa Haralampus on -
I think the concern is a Privacy Act concern. The WH needs to capture what it says and does and how it interacts with public when using social media sites. But advocacy groups are concerned that the WH will capture personally identifiable information of members of the public who comment via social media tools. Think of it this way - the government doesn't need to capture my Facebook info (such as my party affliation) when it captures my comment on health care reform. I thought that the WH request for proposal stated that they need to capture the content of publically-accessible websites - this includes WH blogs. Your State employee, running a State-related blog on Blogger, had better keep track of what was said and when to meet record-keeping mandates.
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Permalink Reply by Walter Neary on -
Thanks, Lisa, that explains a lot. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out, and of course laws differ at the fed, state and local levels. I would think someone cannot pick and choose what data is saved if they post on a government document regardless of who 'owns' the site. In Washington state, we're got a city looking at a huge fine because they did not preserve 'invisible' metadata that someone sent to an elected official on an email via a privately owned email provider. It's in front of the Supreme Court. For anyone interested, there's a brief summary at http://www.wasupremecourtblog.com/tags/oneill-v-city-of-shoreline/ and then of course a Google search would turn up court briefs, decisions, etc...
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