The First Twitter Transition

The controversy started with the National Park Service’s retweeting of crowd picture comparisons of Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s competing inaugurations. A multi-day fracas between the Trump administration’s Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway and the press ensued over a measuring of the length and girth of Trump’s in-person inaugural crowd. Trump’s people instructed NPS to cut it out.

A day after the Inauguration, the @NatlParkService account tweeted: “We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you” accompanied by a picture of a buffalo.

Similarly, starting on inauguration day, stories about Trump “deleting” the LGBT rights page from WhiteHouse.gov went viral. In truth, Obama’s webpage, the most technologically advanced, and ideologically weaponized webpage in U.S. government history, had been archived. Trump was starting with a blank slate. But a viral story gets around the world a few times before the truth has time to catch up.

Then, Tuesday, the internet—as it often does—rallied around a new hero: @BadlandsNPS, a Twitter-verified account for Badlands National Park maintained, presumably, by federal employees of the National Park Service. Somebody, or a few individuals with access to the account, posted (now deleted) factoids about climate change, defying the post-inaugural “gag order” implemented by the Trump administration, as reported by CNN:

“Now that social media guidance has been clarified, the Department and its bureaus should resume Twitter engagement as normal this weekend, with the exception of social media posts on the Secretary’s policy priorities, which will be outlined upon confirmation.”

The deletion of the four climate change tweets quickly become a cause célèbre among the internet left. @BadlandsNPS became their hero, complete with a parody account. Allegations of censorship, suppression of free speech, or hatred of science were common themes. “More like BadASS National Park, AMIRITE!?” has been a popular rallying cry, albeit too long for a #hashtag.

Indeed, an overly broad gag order is quite concerning, but a temporary order, limited to an administration’s policy priorities, is not unreasonable.

All four (now deleted) #ScienceFacts are not in doubt. That said, the hyperbolic claims being bandied about about their problematic deletion don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The cries of censorship ring hollow around the recent(ish) innovation of Twitter, which was in its infancy in waning years of the George W. Bush presidency, but blossomed under an all hands on deck culture of digital government activism nurtured by the Obama administration for eight years.

A single tweet can get you fired, demoted, or reassigned, harder as that may be with federal employees than with employees of a corporation committing a Twitter gaffe. Unlike press releases, the chain-of-command of Twitter might not be as rigorous, but speaking for the government has a similar force and effect—especially on one’s career.

“RT/follow/likes≠endorsement”, which @BadlandsNPS has on its biography, is…meaningless.

Mid-level federal employees using government Twitter accounts do not have first amendment rights to say whatever they want—whether you’re ranger Joe at Yukon Remote Cabin 432 or deputy social director Dan in Washington. It’s not an issue of censorship, but more an unintended consequence of the nature of communication rapidly outpacing government-wide policy, only with 28 year olds at the controls. (To be fair, similar perils, despite the long history of the telephone, still haven’t been resolved with allowing interns to answer government phones.)

At 7:22 p.m. on January 20, Inauguration day, @BadlandsNPS tweeted a still undeleted tweet: “#ClimateChange has implications for naval force structure and operations. Factors driving this include: Water & resource challenges” @USNavy”).

Why, you ask, is a national park in South Dakota tweeting about the effect of climate change on the United States Navy? (Or, in the case of the deleted tweets, ocean acidification or gasoline CO2 emissions?)

Obama’s administration was the first to truly embrace Twitter for public policy aims. And in a broad sense, accounts under his reign had leeway to push messaging entirely unrelated to an agency’s mission or goals. And a new administration gets to shape its message.

Perhaps Trump’s people at Interior and the National Park Service will be less interested in employing however many people to recreate #ScienceFacts being recirculated for years by accounts like @Mashable, or Al Gore’s @ClimateReality, and more interested in getting people to visit our beautiful national parks. That’s their right.

What’s evident in all of the over-hyped kerfuffle over four deleted tweets is that there is no real government-wide Twitter transition plan. Some Twitter accounts are archived by the National Archives and Records Administration, others appear to continue onward.

With so many government accounts, it’s… messy. As we’re finding out for the first time.

While it’s not certain who the individual(s) responsible for the @BadlandsNPS tweets are, BuzzFeed reports that a National Park Service official says that the tweets were the actions of a “former employee not currently authorized to use the park’s account…” and that “the park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized their account had been compromised.”

Prepare yourself, Trump’s administration might (gasp!) say nice things about oil pipelines.