Page 29 - FCW, January/February 2021

34 Presidential Innovation Follows are currently embedded at 22 federal agencies to work
on 26 projects
They took all the tweets and put ’em in a tweet museum
While he was president, Donald Trump governed via Twitter. He used the social network to announce the hiring and firing of top officials, whip votes in Congress and train the ire of tens of millions of followers at lawmakers and journalists when he disagreed with them.
In the waning days of his presidency, Trump used social media to elevate patently false conspiracy theories about vote rigging and — many people are saying — helped create the conditions that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Twitter permanently banned Trump on Jan. 8 for violating the social media service’s “glorification of violence” policy and because the company believed Trump’s tweets amounted to exhortations for future violence. Trump is also currently banned from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat.
As private companies, social media platforms are within their rights to restrict or withhold access to users based on their behavior. But Trump’s tweets while he was president — along with his executive orders, memos, email messages, texts messages, meeting logs and other archival material — are presidential records and therefore must be accessible to the public.
That means his tweets will be back on a limited basis in archival form.
The National Archives and Records Administration, which is charged with the stewardship of federal and presidential records, has already archived 70 Trump administration social media accounts, including 58 institutional and individual Twitter accounts as of this writing. A list is available on NARA’s Trump Presidential Library website. The Twitter accounts have been renamed with a “45” in the
handle to indicate they are archived from the Trump presidency and are accessible via Twitter’s platform.
The @realdonaldtrump account is not among them. The Twitter suspension of Trump’s personal account creates an extra degree of difficulty for NARA and complicates the process of presenting the record of his activity on the social media platform. In response to questions from FCW, NARA issued a statement saying the plans for archiving @realdonaldtrump tweets have not been finalized. However, a few details are known.
Archived tweets will cover the term of Trump’s presidency but not his 2016 campaign or any other political activity before he took office. Tweets will not be available for browsing via Twitter. Instead, NARA officials plan to allow users to download content from @realdonaldtrump and Trump’s other personal accounts.
As of now, it will not be possible for users to engage with Trump’s archived tweets, and there is no plan to allow scholars or other users to
link to individual tweets. It’s not yet known whether the archive will include engagement data, such as the number of likes and retweets or individual replies to tweets.
NARA said it has more than 500 terabytes of Trump records, including 20 terabytes of social media posts to sort and organize, and at this point, there is no timeline for posting the @realdonaldtrump archive.
NARA officials are working with ArchiveSocial, the vendor that managed social media archives at the Trump White House, to maintain direct access to those Executive Office of the President social media archives after Trump left office. According to publicly available contracting documents, the agency awarded the company a sole-source contract estimated at just under $200,000 to “allow NARA staff to work with the source files to design [archival web pages at the Trump library website] and experiment with different presentations of the information.”
— Adam Mazmanian
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