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State Department deleting 17 years of tweets (2009-2025); preservation needed

14 points by sleazylice

by sleazylice

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The State Department announced today they're deleting all @StateDept tweets from before Jan 20, 2025 - that's 17 years of diplomatic communications (2009-2025).
They claim it will be "internally archived" but public access will require FOIA requests. This is a significant departure from past transitions where social media was publicly archived.
I attempted to archive via xAI's API but only captured ~60 tweets (API limitations). The full archive likely contains 40,000-60,000 tweets covering major diplomatic events: Arab Spring, Ukraine conflicts, Iran nuclear deal, COVID response, etc.
This affects not just @StateDept but all embassy, ambassador, and bureau accounts.
Does anyone have tools/access to pull complete Twitter timelines? The deletion could happen any day now.

by CamperBob2

0 subcomment

Bummer. It was never OK to use a private corporation to distribute government communications like this, but nobody who cared had the power to set up an unbiased, permanently-accessible public channel, and nobody who did have the power cared.