How the Presidential Transition Works in the Social Media Age

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/31/digital-transition-how-presidential-transition-works-social-media-age

by ctingom • 10 years ago

156 62 10 years ago

tomdell• 10 years ago

"the handle @POTUS will be made available to the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017... This will also be the case for other Twitter handles, including... @FLOTUS..."

So if Hillary Clinton wins, they're planning on scrubbing the FLOTUS handle's tweets and giving the account to Bill Clinton without a name change?

schoen• 10 years ago

Someone else seems to have registered https://twitter.com/FGOTUS (but judging from the content of the tweets there, might be quite happy to turn it over to the administration in that case).

mkaziz• 10 years ago

First Lord of the US?

jholman• 10 years ago

First Lad of the US, of course.

Figs• 10 years ago

FLOTUS

First Live-in-significant-other of the United States?

First Longtime-companion of the United States?

First Life-partner of the United States?

First Lover of the United States? :P

There's got to be a good gender neutral L word to insert here...

pnathan• 10 years ago

Hmm, with all the renaming and so forth, so many links will rot. >.<

foota• 10 years ago

Seems like adopting ClintonWhiteHouse.gov etc (the alternative is not something I wish to ponder) from the get go would make more sense.

prawn• 10 years ago

In the case of tweets, they redirect based on the ID and not the username so those links at least would endure.

cryptoz2• 10 years ago

The account will retain its more than 11 million followers, but start with no tweets on the timeline. @POTUS44, a newly created handle maintained by NARA, will contain all of President Obama’s tweets and will be accessible to the public on Twitter as an archive of President Obama’s use of the account.

Wait, how are they planning on doing this? Will this copy retain the timestamps and other metadata of the original tweets? I don't understand how this will work.

Edit: The more I think about this the more confusing it sounds. Will the tweets be deleted? Will all the links break? This seems like a very messy way of handling the transition, unless I'm misunderstanding how it will work.

MichaelBurge• 10 years ago

I think the White House can get someone at Twitter to copy anything they need over.

cryptoz2• 10 years ago

Okay, so, what will this link do?

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/786254141182074880

Will it go to a page that says deleted? Is that what "no tweets on the timeline" means? Will each tweet link redirect to the copy?

8ytecoder• 10 years ago

I'd imagine they'd just change[1] the username of the current account and create a new one with @POTUS handle.

[1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/14609

GuiA• 10 years ago

If they do that, then the new POTUS account will start at 0 followers (unless they have a special agreement with Twitter).

Natsu• 10 years ago

If I understand correctly, Bill could end up with @FLOTUS?

Beltiras• 10 years ago

First Lad of the United States

tedajax• 10 years ago

@FGOTUS?

bitwize• 10 years ago

Bill would be styled "First Gentleman", so FGOTUS?

dopeboy• 10 years ago

I used to work at the White House in the Presidential Personnel Office where I worked on an internal staffing tool to help fill political appointed positions across government. As we poured hours and contracting dollars into, we wondered aloud many times whether our work would go on into the next administration. The tool and the workflow behind it is pretty standard so there shouldn't be any reason why not. The general consensus was that if the next administration is a Democratic one, our work had a chance of staying alive.

One thing not mentioned in the article - everything archived by NARA ends up going to Obama's official library. I'm curious if and how they're going to make that accessible to the public.

toomuchtodo• 10 years ago

What was the name of the internal staffing tool?

rebootthesystem• 10 years ago

I worry about polarization to such an extent that administration N might spend millions of dollars to develop tools useful for the running of the nation and, upon transition, these tools are negated to administration M almost purely on an ideological bases.

In other words, we are not supposed to be developing software and tools at the White House, or anywhere else, to support a particular political party but rather in support of our nation.

Not saying this is what you have done. I just have a sense that if Trump wins those not sympathetic with the right might cripple the infrastructure that was developed or let it rot and become useless. This isn't good for anyone.

harryh3• 10 years ago

Do you have any evidence to support your worry? It seems to me that it's mostly unfounded. Nothing like what you describe has ever happened in the past.

r_smart• 10 years ago

I took the above content to mean that a Democratic president would already have ties to the Whitehouse, and maybe be familiar w/the tool already, hence more comfortable with it and willing to keep using. It didn't read to me like an ideological motivation. Rather it's like when companies get a new CEO they come in and change everything and move the company headquarters to be closer to their house. Or when many programmers first start working with a new codebase. "What the hell? That last guy had no idea what he was doing!"

vonzeppelin• 10 years ago

I don't understand the why of this transition. Why does it need to be moved to a new account? Why can't it all just stay on the same account?

Swizec• 10 years ago

Maybe so people can't claim the new president said something they didn't? When you change avatar and name, old tweets update their design.

epc• 10 years ago

The records created by a given Presidential administration are controlled by that administration, even after it's in office. It's unlikely that Twitter or most internet services have a notion of an identity being passed from one administration to the next, preventing the "new" administration from changing or deleting the records created by the previous administration.

adamdecaf• 10 years ago

What's the plan for the 47th+ Presidents?

- https://twitter.com/potus46

- https://twitter.com/potus47

- https://twitter.com/potus48

- https://twitter.com/potus49

- https://twitter.com/potus50

- ...

ceejayoz• 10 years ago

Twitter has yanked names on behalf of celebrities in the past.

colejoh• 10 years ago

That's assuming Twitter will be around for 47th+ presidents.

DominikR• 10 years ago

President Anthony Weiner will ditch Twitter and instead use Snapchat to connect with his underage followers.

hossbeast2• 10 years ago

Facebook.com/ObamaWhiteHouse is a naming collision waiting to happen (president Michelle?)

Go with Facebook.com/whitehouse44

MrZongle2• 10 years ago

Any kind of political dynasty -- whether it be Kennedys, Obamas or Bushes -- should give voters pause. I don't understand the infatuation with neo-royalty.

hossbeast2• 10 years ago

Sure, what does that have to do with the technical mistake of failing to plan for naming collisions?

clamprecht• 10 years ago

In Argentina, the previous president (Cristina Kirchner) refused to give up the twitter account @CasaRosadaAR.

http://www.latintimes.com/pulse/cristina-fernandez-de-kirchn...

quantumpotato_• 10 years ago

Hi I want to point out that a while back "Barack Obama" created a github account.. press releases went out "Obama learns to code" ... but then the github account went down and was replaced by a similarly named one like presidentobama_bot or something like that. Sorry I don't remember the exact string but it was odd.

bennettfeely• 10 years ago

Everyone here is talking about what is going to happen if Hillary is elected.

Is @realDonaldTrump really going to give up tweeting from his account if elected? I'd be surprised.

R_haterade• 10 years ago

One for official business, one for bringing the bantz and keeping the feud with Rosie going.

stephenr• 10 years ago

In a hypothetical situation where Donald Trump is elected President of the United States, your concern is:

Is @realDonaldTrump really going to give up tweeting from his account

syngrog66• 10 years ago

wait a minute... the President is communicating on a private server account? not via a "secure" government server? someone tell Comey quick so he can write another letter to Congress revealing this madness. We still have a week left.

I wonder if any other government employees are too. I wonder if any are passing classified info thru them, especially in DM's.

umanwizard• 10 years ago

Last I checked Obama never sent and received classified information through his Twitter account, nor deleted anything from his Twitter account after learning it would likely be investigated.

odonnellryan• 10 years ago

Hillary never deleted anything after she learned of the investigation.

Her lawyers were given specific instructions and they followed them.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

Besides the @POTUS handle, there will also be a @realPOTUS representing whoever thinks he or she is supposedly the real president but the election was rigged.

rahkiin• 10 years ago

The page says it will archive Obama's snapchats. Now, I thought the #1 feature of SnapChat was that they are deleted afterwards. So how does that work? Did Obama screenshot every SnapChat he made?

skinnymuch• 10 years ago

I'm guessing you've never used Snapchat before? You can save your own Snaps before sending them out. So that's prob what has been happening.

Also Snapchat has a permanent Memories feature now

How the Presidential Transition Works in the Social Media Age

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