The social media transition
Social Media
The social media transition
- By Adam Mazmanian
- Oct 31, 2016
The First Lady's Snapchat account will be archived and preserved along with the rest of the Obama administration's social media.
Plans to archive tweets from the @POTUS Twitter account to clear the decks for the new administration have been in the works since at least August. Now the White House has fleshed out plans to archive web content, videos, images and social media content from a variety of platforms including Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, iTunes, Snapchat, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, the WhiteHouse.gov website and MySpace.
In an Oct. 31 blog post, Kori Schulman, special assistant to the president and deputy chief digital officer, announced that tweets made under President Barack Obama's @POTUS handle will be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration and viewable under the newly created @POTUS44 account. As FCW first reported in August, the new administration will start fresh, at least when it comes to social media, with a blank slate @POTUS account.
A similar process will occur with the vice presidential, first lady and press secretary Twitter accounts and official accounts on platforms such as Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram.
The Obama administration is also looking to make the "We the People" petition platform a permanent part of the White House's digital operation. The service attracted 12 million registered users, who created more than 470,000 petitions.
"The 'We the People' code has been open-sourced, and we're taking every step possible to make it easy for future administrations to carry on this tradition," Schulman said.
Plans are also afoot to make White House social media downloadable as bulk, open data. In the meantime, the administration is casting a wide net for proposals on ways to archive the content and make it as open and available as possible.
About the Author
Adam Mazmanian is executive editor of FCW.
Before joining the editing team, Mazmanian was an FCW staff writer covering Congress, government-wide technology policy, health IT and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to joining FCW, Mr. Mazmanian was technology correspondent for National Journal and served in a variety of editorial at B2B news service SmartBrief. Mazmanian started his career as an arts reporter and critic, and has contributed reviews and articles to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, Newsday, Architect magazine, and other publications. He was an editorial assistant and staff writer at the now-defunct New York Press and arts editor at the About.com online network in the 1990s, and was a weekly contributor of music and film reviews to the Washington Times from 2007 to 2014.
Click here for previous articles by Mazmanian. Connect with him on Twitter at @thisismaz.