It Is Now Easier for Gov’t Employees to Use Social Media

If you follow White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Twitter, you may have noticed the following statement in his bio:

Comments & messages received through official WH pages are subject to the PRA and may be archived. Learn more wh.gov/privacy

What is the PRA? It’s The Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires the White House “to preserve records created or received by the President or his staff,” according to whitehouse.gov. This includes Twitter and social networks.

The Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum yesterday, which outlined some specific activities that can take place outside of the PRA and all of the time consuming approvals that come with it. Specifically, it addresses:

many uses of wikis, the posting of comments, the conduct of certain contests, and the rating and ranking of posts or comments by website users. This Memorandum applies whether agency interactions are occurring on a .gov website or on a third-party platform.

However, there will still be gray areas, the Washington Post reports.

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