The Library of Congress archives everyone’s Tweets
by Dr. Samori Swygert
We live in a highly sophisticated and technology driven society. Many of us have become desensitized to the intrusion of privacy by various governmental agencies. We’ve seen civil liberties dwindle away piece by piece under the Patriot Act. Many people are comfortable with the sacrifice or trade-off of civil liberties for the promise of national security.
Edward Snowden, William Binney, and other whistleblowers have divulged the various means in which the government conducts “data mining.” This is a process in which any and all desired digital data is collected, intercepted, screened, stored, warehoused, and archived for retrieval at any request.
Well, the Library of Congress and Twitter signed an agreement in which the Library of Congress collects and stores all Tweets from the users of Twitter.
This may be old news to some people, but this may be new news to many people. The following is a direct excerpt from the Library of Congress website : “This month, all those objectives will be completed. We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012.”
I think the important message in all of this is that as consumers and patrons, we need to truly understand all the implications of the privacy agreements before we click “ok” or “agree” at all times. Many service providers of software, telecommunication, and other digital services have disclosures that we should think about seriously. Many companies have established contracts with the government to hand over your personal data (if requested) to specific government agencies. We’ve seen this resurface with the email and cellphone providers in this Edward Snowden versus the NSA debacle.
Twitter is made for individuals to publicly express their opinions, interests, and perspectives. However, I think it’s important to keep this in the back of your mind as you think about posting various statements and pictures on the internet. We all can use a reminder, but I also believe we need to remind our kids and adolescent family members about internet etiquette, appropriateness, and integrity of character.
We’re in the age of “selfies,” “cyberbullying,” and “doing it for the Vine!,” but always remember Big Brother is watching, Third Party Cyber Voyeurs are lurking, and what you say and post can potentially come back to haunt you in the future. Don’t forget about the young black male that is serving time for threatening the President on Twitter.
This is also extremely important in era when unemployment is high, job and education competition is intense. You don’t want your future judged on a knee jerk Tweet, drunk Tweet, or indecent photo that you posted. I think sociopolitical commentary is okay as long as it’s respectable, logical, and devoid of violent rhetoric.
Here are some links from the Library of Congress for reference and to share with your children:
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress/
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/files/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf
