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Internet Policies

Will There Be New Government Social Media Content Guidelines?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 21, 2017
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Interior Department reactivates Twitter accounts after shutdown following inauguration, Washington Post
“The Interior Department reactivated its official Twitter accounts early Saturday after an abrupt shutdown following two shares of tweets that were unsympathetic to President Trump during his inauguration. Thomas Crosson, a spokesman for the National Park Service, the Interior agency whose employee retweeted the offending tweets, said the action was “inconsistent with the agency’s approach to engaging the public through social media.” “The Department of Interior’s communications team determined that it was important to stand down Twitter activity across the Department temporarily, except in the case of public safety,” Crosson said in an email. “Now that social media guidance has been clarified, the Department and its bureaus should resume Twitter engagement as normal this weekend.” With one exception, Crosson said: No social media posts on the policy priorities of the new Interior secretary, because Trump nominee Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) has not yet been confirmed. It’s safe to assume that the Park Service won’t be estimating the crowd size of Saturday’s Women’s March on Twitter.”
Keith’s note: This is troubling. I wonder if similar action will be taken against @NOAA and @NASA for posting all of these tweets regarding recent scientific studies about the scope, scale, and causes of global climate change.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

One response to “Will There Be New Government Social Media Content Guidelines?”

  1. fcrary says:
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    That was a heavy-handed reaction, but the retweets were probably against existing policy. One was about the size of the crowd at the inauguration. Estimating crowd sizes has been against Park Service policy since 1995. (They were threatened with a lawsuit for estimating the Million Man March fell short of its name, and decided to stay out of crowd-size-estimating in the future.) The second retweet was about content being removed from the White House website, and the content in question didn’t sound all that relevant to the Park Service. I’ve heard complaints about misuse of official NASA social media accounts, over issues which seemed similarly off topic.