Deleted tweet by Donald Trump during the Alabama Republican primary. Preserved by ProPublica.
When President Donald Trump issues a tweet, the whole world takes notice. It’s no surprise then that equal attention is paid when he deletes one. While the social media posts of Canadian politicians and government institutions may not garner quite the same attention, concerns are being raised nonetheless about how often similar deletions are occurring north of the 49th parallel.
Several times this year, Conservative MPs have asked questions in the House of Commons about how often government entities (including departments, agencies, and crown corporations) delete social media posts and what reasons they have for doing so. In November, the government tabled a report1 aimed at addressing the issue.
The documents reveal a range of practices among government agencies when it comes to deleting social media posts. It’s important to note that in this report, “social media” was defined as Facebook, Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat; “posts” referred not only to official messages from the government, but also comments by users.
As reported by iPolitics, almost 1500 posts were deleted from government social media accounts between January 2016 and September 2017. The reasons for these deletions vary widely. Most often, departments cited errors (grammar, an incorrect link or image, premature publication, etc.) for deleting one of their own original posts.
Whose rules?
Not every government body had deleted social media posts. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency were among those that said they had no deletions to report during the specified time period.
Others, like the Department of Justice and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, simply reported they “[do] not track the number of posts deleted”, and left it at that.
Of those that do keep track, some shared links to their respective departmental policies governing these decisions. However, upon closer examination, the policies — like this one linked to in the report by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada — only pertain to the deletion of user comments, not original posts by the government bodies themselves.
Again, it’s important to remember that these policies offer the public no insights into when and why a department may remove its own posts from sites like Facebook or Twitter. Also these policies may differ from department to department.
Evading accountability
In September, following Roy Moore’s defeat of Luther Strange in the Republicans’ Alabama primary runoff, Trump deleted his tweets supporting the loser. A face-saving move? Possibly. But actions like this might also represent an attempt to skirt accountability.
Watchdog groups in the U.S. claim the president’s deleting of social media posts violates the Presidential Records Act, but what about Canadian government institutions?
Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat provides rules to all government departments for the management of communications, including social media, but there are no stated directives on when or why official government social media posts can be deleted.
Retention and disposition
As discussed by Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo in their book Managing Records:A handbook of principles and practice, organizations and businesses should always have a schedule in place that dictates the length of time records will be kept, and when and how they will ultimately be destroyed. Such retention and disposition schedules help organizations to make transparent and rational decisions about how long to hold onto records. Shepherd and Yeo also write that these plans may be needed for legal defence, in order to show why certain records were destroyed.
“Irregularities in destruction procedures can bring suspicion, if an organization is taken to court or if there is an access request under freedom of information laws, that records may have been destroyed with intent to suppress embarrassing evidence,” they write. “The existence of a structured retention system allows the organization to prove that any destruction took place as part of normal business practice.”
There’s no denying that social media posts — generated during the ordinary course of a government department’s operations — are records. For this reason, they should be subject to retention and disposition schedules like any other departmental record.
The Treasury Board empowers each department’s head of communications with the authority to create social media accounts, approve social media strategies, and ultimately to “dispose of” official accounts. As a result, there is no government-wide consistency in terms of social media retention and disposition practices. This is why the recent report in parliament revealed that some departments keep very clear records about each deleted social media post while others keep no records of them at all.
Responsible deletion
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s official Twitter account (@ec_minister) deleted an embarrassing tweet about Syria in early November. McKenna’s follow-up tweet via her personal account (@cathmckenna) appears to have also been deleted.
The need to quickly or unexpectedly delete a post will always exist. That’s the nature of social media. The question becomes how is a government entity or politician held accountable should the need arise to hastily remove an ill-conceived post?
Retention and disposition schedules are one way.
But even with these in place, there will be times when a post has to be deleted (destroyed) before its scheduled disposition. In these cases, a mandatory follow-up post, acknowledging the deletion, might be one way to prevent a record from prematurely vanishing completely.
Earlier this month, federal environment minister Catherine McKenna found herself in hot water when her official government Twitter account issued a tweet praising Syria for signing on to the Paris climate agreement. The tweet, since deleted, was publicly decried and widely reported on, with McKenna apologizing for the mistake.
“I tweeted personally to say that it was unacceptable,” she told reporters.
However, an advanced search on Twitter reveals no posts mentioning Syria on either her official departmental Twitter or personal account in the month of November, suggesting any subsequent tweets about the embarrassing episode were also deleted.
It’s incidents like this that exemplify a need for formal rules about how Canadian government officials dispose of records in the social media age.
NOTES:
- Canada. Order/Address of the House of Commons. Library of Parliament. Q-1129. Nov 3 2017.