While I was preoccupied filing taxes last week, the Library of Congress announced a deal with Twitter. Basically, Twitter will donate all public tweets, past, present, and future, to the LoC for archival purposes. Twitter elaborates:
It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. […] after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.
I’d think the publicly funded and lofty Library of Congress would have more meaningful projects to prioritize ahead of rescuing Twitter from their inability to provide more than a few days of searchable tweets (without bringing down the server farm). But what do I know, there’s probably quite a few needles in this pop culture haystack that we’ll reflect on years from now.
I do have a few logistical questions for the parties, though. Not because I’m personally concerned, but to stimulate a dialog as we engage in this new era of open online communication.
It goes without saying that Twitter reserves the right to share our tweets. In fact, that’s their obvious and number one function. Yet I wonder if their privacy policy will be updated to reflect the magnitude of this data dump and if it’ll occur before Twitter makes the first handoff. Related, when exactly does that happen? Also, if I were to delete a tweet, would it be retroactively deleted from the Library of Congress’ archive in the following 6 month db transfer? What about a username change? Better yet, is there a method for users to opt-out without making all future tweets private? Lastly, a large percent of Twitter participation occurs outside the US. And will foreign entities care that our government is taking possession of the entire Twitter archive? (When the same opportunity may not exist for them.)