Library of Congress to Receive Entire Twitter Archive
The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library’s repository of historical documents. The Library of Congress has long been the repository of important, historical documents and the Twitter library, as a whole, is something historic in itself. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information. I’m not sure about how you feel about this, but I’m sure many will not be happy. Having all your Twitter comments in the Library of Congress was certainly not what people were thinking about when using the service. As always, once you put something on the internet you are making it public.
“We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,” said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library’s national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. “The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else billions and billions of tweets are there.”
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