Social networks and political transition in the United States
With Barack Obama’s eight-year term in office coming to an end and with his popularity at record highs, perhaps in part due to his effective use of the social media, I found this White House blog post on how the presidential transition will be carried out in the social media era particularly interesting.
First, let’s spell out some of the changes over the last two terms of Barack Obama: social media has gone a long way from being a sort of frivolous pastime for some, to become important communication channels that not only allow people to express their views, but also provide innovative interaction between voters and the presidency.
If we think about the eight years of communication carried out through channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Medium or Snapchat, along with the tens of hours of video posted on YouTube, or the more than 30,000 tweets or almost half a million petitions registered on We the People, it’s clear we are talking here not only about an important contribution to the work of government, but also about historical records that must be stored, as has been done previously with the documents, letters or notes press of other presidents.
To this end, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has set up an electronic storage repository that will preserve documents in their original formats, and also, as far as possible, in their original channels. The procedures designed for the presidential transition must take into account that the Obama administration has been, in most cases, the creator of these channels, and that in many cases the president’s own accounts are mixedin with others generated directly in the name of the White House or the presidency.
The administration will create a new Twitter account, @POTUS44, where tweets created during the administration of the 44th president will be stored, @POTUS will be transferred to the new occupant of the White House along with its more than eleven million followers, but void of tweets. If the polls turn out to be right, Hillary Clinton will manage the @POTUS account, and her husband, Bill Clinton, will control @FLOTUS, the account theoretically reserved… for the country’s First Lady (and I don’t think he will be too worried about that :-)
Other social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Medium, Tumblr, Vimeo, iTunes or YouTube will follow the same procedure: content will be transferred to the Obama presidency’s specific account, and the accounts will then be run by the new cabinet. The website of the White House, WhiteHouse.gov, will be preserved in its own domain as was done in the case of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and the domain and tools such as the mailing list or RSS, will be made available to the new administration.
All videos and images will be accessible for use, since by definition, anything produced by the presidency of the United States is in the public domain. Finally, the administration of the We The People page will be transferred to the new administration, and will seek to preserve the tradition of dedicating resources to answering petitions. The code of the API has ben open sourced, and all resources are open to requests for use for those who may want to build something for use and consultation by the public, and it is possible to envisage that many interesting possibilities may emerge from it.
In the era of social media, it is very interesting to see the approach to social media by Obama, one that contrasts sharply with what happened in countries such as Argentina. This is not about propaganda, but instead is about creating powerful communication channels that improve government’s relationship with citizens, the management of which need to be handled carefully. One can only winder when we’ll see a similar approach in Spain…
(En español, aquí)
