Should Governments Bother Archiving Social Media?

Just like physical documents and emails, government social media conversations and interactions are considered public data.

But while many agencies have invested in automated tools to help them mine platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to fulfill Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, there haven’t been a high volume of them. Seattle and Austin, Texas, both use services to archive digital activity and communications. Yet, representatives from both cities said that they rarely receive any public information requests for social media postings.