The Upside of Obama's Social Media Warehousing

You can just about picture White House new media director Macon Phillips banging his head against his office wall at the very same time he's banging out a blog post explaining why the White House, in its view, has no choice but to build out a system for archiving all the social media content being sent the White House's way. History recommends it, and the law demands it. But critics pounced on the plan's Orwellian implications when it first became known. Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times ran the headline "W.H. Collects Web Users' Data Without Notice."

The crux of the problem is that, in a breathtaking display of shortsightedness, the 1978 Presidential Records Act -- passed in that post Nixonian moment where American confidence in the presidency was, shall we say, a bit shaky -- utterly fails to dictate how the National Archives and Records Administration should treat Facebook wall posts and Twitter replies. In the face of such disappointing legislative oversight, the White House has two choices: (a) comply with NARA's guidance that it archive social media, (b) ignore NARA, or (c) get off the social web. The Obama White House is choosing (a) -- but not without causing itself considerable pain.

The truly important change announced by Phillips is that the White House has, somewhat belatedly, taken the best of their critics' critiques (as well as a no-doubt determinative recommendation made by us in this space) and added a warning notice to their online profiles, letting commenters know that their online interactions with the White House will enter into recorded history. The White House Twitter and Facebook accounts now have a note that reads along the lines of: "Comments posted on and messages received through official White House pages are subject to the Presidential Records Act and may be archived." (Twitter's brevity demands abbreviations, but for those fans and friends wondering what the heck "PRA" means, there's a link to the White House's full privacy statement.)

When the day comes that Obama's presidential records and social media archives are released to the public, the White House says that there will be a filter in place. NARA will withhold commenters' personal information where releasing it "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

The added warning is a praise-worthy admission of reality. As is the case with just about everything when it comes to the President of the United States, social media is different once it enters the White House orbit. In normal people space, social media is ephemeral (though not as ephemeral as we might think, what with server logs and the like). But that ephemerality isn't a luxury that the president has -- with very good reason. Think Watergate, and the 18 minutes we're still scrambling to find. Think the Bush White House emails. We have a Presidential Records Act because presidents throw stuff away, or otherwise keep it from the public. The PRA shifted our way of doing things in the United States from the idea that a president's records are his own, to the notion that they belong to the public. That's a shift that many good government advocates, not to mention students of history, find to be a very good thing.

There's an argument to be made that NARA should revisit PRA and update it for the digital age, or that Congress should get busy crafting legislation that is more in tune with modern methods of communication. Personal privacy of citizens in the digital age is as valid a concern as presidential accountability. But in the interim, the Obama White House doesn't seem to have much of a choice, if it wants to stay both online and on the right side of the law. It has to keep record of our comments and tweet backs. That fits nicely into the narrative you see developing, where the White House is a bunch of spammers who are trawling the Internet looking for dissenters, now eager to track the citizenry via tweets and wall posts. That criticism is, often, the creation of political opponents aimed at getting the White House scared to participate online. And you can imagine the outcry that would -- or, at least, should -- greet the Obama White House if it decided to go with choice (c), that it doesn't have to abide by the inconvenient Presidential Records Act when it came to what it does online.