Twitter won’t let National Archives revive realDonaldTrump | Hacker News Reader

Twitter won’t let National Archives revive realDonaldTrump

politico.com

11 pointsTomte13 comments

Maybe the National Archives should ask Gab instead since they have all his tweets archived since 2017.

This is such a weird issue: NARA has the job of maintaining this archive, not Twitter. The issue isn't that NARA doesn't have a copy of the content: the issue is that they somehow want to host the national archive on Twitter's service? That doesn't even sound like a smart thing to do even if it were a reasonable request: Twitter might simply go out of business, or change their model... NARA should have its own website with all of the tweets. Hell: it could be a PDF!

That's exactly it. NARA is trying to figure out how to do that. They don't have an existing plan in place for making tweets public.

So they asked Twitter to do it. Twitter said no. NARA said that's fine, they'll figure it out.

TFA actually quotes NARA saying that. “Twitter is solely responsible for the decision of what content is available on their platform." It's just the headline that makes it seem like there's a conflict here.

I'm not sure why NARA even bothered to ask. It might be interesting to know. I suspect it has to do with making the presentation of the records as true-to-life as possible, the same way an archaeologist wants to preserve as much of the context of a dig as they can (and not just loot up a bunch of artifacts).

Twitter doesn't wanna do that, understandably. So NARA will have to figure something else out. But it didn't hurt to ask.

If an elected official took it upon himself to make proclamations by spray-painting graffiti on the walls of a local Wendy's, that Wendy's would not automatically become part of the National Archives. It's private property. There are official channels for elected officials to use for communication and it's the job of the government to ensure those official channels are utilized.

If there is a law that certain government communications should be preserved, and a private entity interferes with that law, the said entity may be charged as liable in a case.

In that case, the entity that interfered with that preservation of communication was the President himself, when he used non-government channels for communication with no established plan for archiving said communications.

The issue isn't that Twitter is refusing to give a copy of it to NARA: it is that NARA wants to host the archive on Twitter.

Twitter isn't preventing the National Archives from preserving Donald Trump's tweets for the public record, they're just preventing those tweets from being republished on Twitter, as that would be an end-run around their ban of Donald Trump's account. This is within their rights and not in interference with any laws.

Props to Twitter for not being bullied by that ex-presidentual liar.

As opposed to the current presidential liar? Or his former boss who was also a presidential liar? Or Clinton, a notable presidential liar who by sheet coincidence was married to a wannabe presidential liar?

Just trying to narrow down which presidential liars are acceptable and which ones we throw down the memory hole.

When you wake up you will find that the current president is not bullying twitter or making racist remarks thereupon whereas McTrumpie and S Cohen are looking to take down twitter. But you knew that.

Capitalists know that zillionaire guy could have paid to create his own messaging method, any time he chose. Instead, he chose to delegate control of his messaging to a private entity, with different standards than his own.

Some things really are consequences.

He got his point across.

For every innocuous "I will not be attending X event" tweet that Twitter deemed "violent", one can easily locate dozens of Democrats threatening murder, insurrection, harassment treason, arson, robbery, and vandalism.

So when the average voter sees THEIR guy get silenced, while folks with the magic "D" by their name get a pass...

And then that voter sees those organizations and their employees donate almost exclusively to politicians and causes ALSO bearing the magic "D"...

A point is made that won't soon be forgotten.

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