Moments after Barack Obama was inaugurated the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009, the White House blog was born with a call to action written by new media director Macon Phillips that the administration’s “online programs will put citizens first” through the tenets of communication, transparency, and participation.
Among other initiatives in the months since, the White House entered a new phase on May 1, 2009 with another blog entry announcing social networking transparency on numerous feeds, including @WhiteHouse on Twitter:
…[the President] called on government to “recognize that we cannot meet the challenges of today with old habits and stale thinking.” He added that “we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative,” and pledged to “reach beyond the halls of government” to engage the public.
On Tuesday afternoon, May 12, 2009, Twitter effectively told the White House: No More Transparency!
Here you can read for yourself what Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote:
The White House Twitter account is fairly new, but the citizen participation team running it is already announcing livestreams, retweeting NASA, and pointing people to agency websites.
If history repeats itself, @WhiteHouse may follow the lead of @MassGovernor and @Schwarzenegger and reply to constituents.
The problem with this new Twitter update is if you follow the White House on Twitter and the White House replies to someone directly, e.g. @someone blah blah blah, you won’t see it unless you are also following @someone.
Let me say that again, looking at Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s feed.
See these tweets where Patrick replied to individual requests for MBTA plans, school aid, and crime? Under Tuesday morning’s Twitter protocols, you could follow @MassGovernor and read all of his replies to everyone–but under yesterday afternoon’s updated protocols, you can only see @ reply tweets to people you also follow.
And that, my friends, is a prime example of Twitter telling the people–you and me–that we can no longer read what the White House says online. Because transparency is not merely reading tweets that are broadcast out or to “discover” people referenced inside a tweet, but replies to individual requests. No more.
Twitter is now contrary to everything the White House is trying to accomplish, let alone any other government agency, business, or individual using Twitter to engage. That’s a shame.
If you’d like to add your voice to the opposition, a bandwagon of users are forming to request satisfaction. Will Biz listen and react?
Related posts:
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- Do You Care That @BarackObama Doesn’t Tweet?
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 14 comments }
Yes, and no. I’m glad you’re taking a stand against this decision, and I see why you chose government as a prime example, but this sentence:
“And that, my friends, is a prime example of Twitter telling the people–you and me–that we can no longer read what the White House says online.”
…is simply untrue. We can still read what the White House says on Twitter; we simply need to go to twitter.com/whitehouse (which is annoying and cumbersome and silly, of course).
Jillian C. York´s last blog post..Blogging for a Cause: Global Voices Advocacy
Fair enough, Jillian. But suppose you’re a lobbyist or a news reporter or any citizen following not only @WhiteHouse, but every member of Congress, every Governor, and every military official on Twitter. Do Biz, Ev, and Jack truly expect folks to “visit” twitter.com every hour to see potential updates not in their stream?
People won’t be going to twitter.com to do anything because they’ll use TweetDeck or PeopleBr0wsr – tools that improve your twitter experience. I can just add a search for @whitehouse to one of these apps and viola: I’m now seeing everything they’re up to!
Oh come on, you know I think this whole thing is stupid; I just felt that your sentence was factually incorrect!
Jillian C. York´s last blog post..Blogging for a Cause: Global Voices Advocacy
I liked your post & agree with Jillian that it is completely silly. What twitter just did was take us back to the old days when we bookmark our favorite sites and view them everyday to see the update. Twitter was great because it was fast paced, and allowed the user to adapt their content how they saw fit based on interest and conversations. By taking away even the option to do so, they are telling everyone what the point of twitter is & apparently I have been using it wrong this whole time.
This decision means that anyone who isn’t following @whitehouse won’t learn about them in any replies the people they follow send to that account, nor will citizens be able to see responses to answers unless @whitehouse makes a point not to start the tweet with the recipient’s username.
All around my qualm with this is decision is that it puts a chilling effect on our ability to discover new potentially interesting people or conversations to follow unless users adapt to put their recipients at the end of their tweets. Or perhaps replies will take on the convention “R@AriWriter nice post” – or some variation of it.
Thanks for writing about this issue from an interesting angle.
To bad they didn’t just give us the option in a control panel. I think this is a serious mistake, primarily because it prevents us from discovering new folks to follow.
I care less about discovering new people to follow, but more about watching conversations, if even one-sided.
When I started hearing about the no more @replies, at first it didn’t bother me until I did more investigation. And now reading your blog post it’s crystal clear this is a move against transparency.
Granted, it can be annoying when followers have prolonged back-and-forth conversations where the tweets aren’t developed thoughtfully. But you know what? It’s easy to blow off. It’s only an annoyance. But losing the @replies is a significant feature loss. Hopefully, as Biz Stone mentioned, Twitter will replace this with another feature that accomplishes the same thing, but more effectively.
I just wish they wouldn’t have cut it before unveiling its replacement. Feels a little like “#facebook fail”
twitter/michelletripp
Michelle Tripp´s last blog post..Old Media Falling Into The “Digeration Gap”
To be fair to Twitter’s management, my guess the move was to appease how Oprah, Ashton, and others use Twitter and to protect their followers from seeing every back-and-forth tweet. Doesn’t make it right.
If nothing else, Twitter, Inc. ought to have blogged about the proposed change before it was to be enacted to receive feedback.
I guess I can see the reasoning re: Oprah, Ashton Kucher and so forth, but they represent a rather small minority of Tweeters. (And I’m not following them anyway!) I wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about until today. I thought perhaps something was just broken and that was why my streams seemed to have fewer conversational Tweets showing up. This explains a lot.
Alas following replies to people I don’t know is my number one way to pick new people to follow. If I see X has replied to Y about something that looks interesting I’ll click on Y to see who it is and what the discussion is about. Often I’ll jump in and end up following Y. I like finding people this way because I can find people solely based on the value of their conversations. I don’t have to search out someone interested in pomegranates. I don’t have to decided what I’m in the mood to discuss. I just see something that catches my interest and jump in.
I wonder what other sort of tool or feature they feel will replace this functionality. Or perhaps they’ll bring it back. One of my Twitter friends suggested that they took it away with the intention of bringing it back after the uproar to show that they “listen and respond to users.”
Or, if I read this properly the work around will be to move the @whoever to the middle or end of the reply instead of the beginning so that messages show up for all. For example, if I type “To: @whoever,” would Twitter consider that a reference rather than a reply? I might start doing that.
Heidi Cool´s last blog post..Say what you mean—don’t let jargon drive your visitors away.
Umm dude, you *do* realize that the Whitehouse Twitter stream has not once yet used an @reply?
http://twitter.com/whitehouse
Such dramatic headlines as above really don’t help anyone or anything.
Yes, I stated such above, indicating if the White House follows the tradition of Governors Patrick and Schwarzenegger, your comment would be moot.
Ari, they’ve sort of reversed their policy last night. Hence the downtime.
http://www.toddrjordan.com/thebroadbrush/2009/05/twitter-replies-alive/
I was ticked about this as well. I love the organic nature of discovery it provided.
Todd Jordan´s last blog post..Twitter Replies Get New Life
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