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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Congressional Staff and Social Media

At Famous DC, a congressional aide writes "Confessions of a Capitol Hill Staffer: 9 Secrets from the Inside."  Here is #8:
Hill staff are careful and scared. Twitter pages are private. Facebook profiles don’t include your last name. Instagram is completely fake. Why jeopardize a $40,000 a year job and embarrass your parents for something you wrote on Twitter? Reporters love monitoring this and making examples of the offenders.
Staffers who aren’t intentionally vague about what’s going on at work or, who are simply straight-up classless about what’s happening in the world, get called out. Any follower within gated protected accounts who has the power of the screenshot at their fingertips can and will send a stupid post out to reporters. As a measure of protection, we try very hard to make sure our feeds are full of only kittens, photos of us doing cool things in D.C., or press releases we’ve written.
And those of us who attempt about managing the boss’ Twitter account on their phones: these Congessional offices are one beer away from having a deleted Tweet front-and-center on Politwoops.
What is Politiwoops?   "An archive of the public statements deleted by U.S. politicians. Explore the tweets they would prefer you couldn't see." Click here for the top deleted tweets of 2014.

Late in 2014, one House aide had to resign after criticizing the president's daughters on Facebook.

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