Yesterday, I ranted a bit about how Twitter is getting an amount of press that's disproportionate to its importance, relative to other forms of social media. While that result is unfortunate, and perhaps misleading for people who are building budgets for their social media strategy, it's not all that pernicious. People may later regret their behavior during a media bacchanal, but they've only hurt themselves, or a single company, in the process.
When the US government joins in the festivities, I start to worry.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office
(GAO), the government unit known as the "investigative arm of
Congress," has launched a presence on YouTube and Twitter. Chuck Young,
GAO's managing director of public affairs, says the video and
microblogging sites aim to help the agency keep people informed about
GAO's work.
You may wonder, how harmful could that really be? Just another sign of the millenials making themselves felt in Washington, DC, just as they did in Obama's campaign. Heck, it's just another channel of communications to help citizens know what their government is doing, right?
Wrong. What the US government says, and when it says it, and what happens to its statements, is a matter of public importance. Here are a few examples:
- During the Iraq War, both government employees and contractors have regularly left sensitive information on unsecure file servers.
- Researchers working at NASA, NOAA, and other government agencies were under pressure not to release findings that contradicted the Bush Administration's policies on climate change, contraception, stem cell research, the state of the economy, and other issues.
- Historians at the University of Illinois found alterations in documents on the White House's web site that covered the early phase of the Gulf War.
And these are just recent examples. By no means is hanky-panky with government documents limited to periods when Republicans were in the White House. Nor are incidents limited to the executive branch, or even the federal level of US government. Rightly, Americans get upset when the government mishandles important information, no matter who does it.
Which brings us to Twitter and YouTube. Both of these outlets are fine for public officials to use, as long as there is no long-term danger to the integrity of the information itself. Again, we're talking about when it was communicated, what it included, and whether or not it changed.
Twitter and YouTube do not follow the guidelines that restrict how government organizations handle, preserve, and (when appropriate) destroy public documents. Through no one's bad intentions, US government information, from the GAO no less, might disappear from Twitter's and YouTube's servers. Someone might accidentally delete the information, or scrub it from the system during a clean-up of content that hasn't been accessed for a long time. (Like, say, a video from the GAO.) Obviously, the more the US government fails to maintain its own backups of this information, the worse the problem is.
How a government official uses social media is a big part of this week's news cycle. After Sarah Palin's resignation, she posted an explanation of her decision on her Facebook page, and she has been responding to critics on Twitter. She was already a fairly active user of both media, where she regularly spoke about issues that, because of ethics inquiries, have already landed in the courts, and may do so again. Who, then, is responsible for the integrity of these communications?
Government should think creatively about how to reach citizens. While Twitter and YouTube are easy ways to reach a big audience, they also raise questions about the trade-off between popularity and reliability.
Foods were created for as to live and grow hehtaly. But nowadays the global news about the food poisoning is so shocking because it threatens public health and diseases are hurting everyone. Because it seems like everywhere you turn, there’s a story about how unhehtaly Americans have become. Obesity and diabetes are on the rise among adults and children alike. A recent story in the New York Times reported that kidney stones are becoming more and more common in children as young as 5 or 6. A child with kidney stones used to be a rare occurrence, but now, some hospitals have opened pediatric kidney stone clinics in order to accommodate all of the kids that come in with kidney stones. The main preventative measure parents can take to help their children avoid developing a kidney stone is to encourage them to stay hydrated and discourage the over consumption of salt. However, it’s hard for parents to be with their kids all the time to ensure they’re putting the right things in their bodies—like at school—and sometimes kids just don’t listen. Not only is a kidney stone harmful to your kid, it can be a major blow to your budget. If your child develops a kidney stone, or is hit with some other health issue, you can always get payday installment loans to help cover the medical costs until you get paid next.
Posted by: Dzekula | 09/09/2012 at 09:17 PM