7 ms·

Here's an explanation--the new management of the agencies want to review the social media policies.

by barney54 10y ago

Avshalom 10y ago
> social media policies social media policies is sci-fi way of saying "people saying things" though.
- barney54 10y ago
  True, but this isn't a case of people speaking from their own point of view. The social media account represent the Departments in an official capacity.
  - joshkpeterson 10y ago
    This is great and all, but climate change is going to kill a lot of people so......
cyberferret 10y ago
In my line of business, I get to inherit web and mobile apps from other developers all the time. One thing I never do is to completely shut down the app and take it offline while I scour through the code to ensure everything is ok. Not unless there is a glaring problem or security hole that is already evident. It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche...
- loafa 10y ago
  Fair enough, but the EPA twitter account isn't exactly mission-critical for anyone, it can afford to not tweet for a little while. Also I don't think it's particularly ironic that the President of the United States gets certain privileges which his subordinates don't.
  - fpgeek 10y ago
    Except, in the general case, that isn't true. Many of the Park Service social media accounts that were shut down do disseminate emergency information. That part of the "shutdown" was rolled back once the issues were understood, but in the interim those kinds of Twitter feeds were pointing people to their Facebook page for up-to-date information. I guess we're lucky that no one included Facebook in the shutdown order and even luckier that there was no relevant emergency while the social media policy was being clarified.
- vacri 10y ago
  > It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche... Kind've, kind've not. If you're a government agency and you employ a new staffer outside of PR, you're not expecting them to tweet stream-of-consciousness. Trump, on the other hand, was largely elected because he did do this and it's expected of him.
  - facetube 10y ago
    What evidence is there of this? From this vantage point, it looks like he was elected despite his Twitter falsehoods (read: lies) and stream-of-(un)consciousness, not because of it. He lost the popular vote by three million votes. He is historically unpopular.
    - vacri 10y ago
      He did lose the popular vote, and I'm definitely not a Trump apologist. But however you want to carve it, over 60 million people got out there on election day(-ish) and spent effort to vote for him in a non-compulsory election. I'm first in line to criticise the primitive Electoral College, the cancerous state of US gerrymandering, and the vapidity of the two-party tribal system, but voter turnout was high. Bush and Gore each got 50M votes in the 2000 election. Obama/McCain was 70M/60M (also: McCain's loss was much greater than Trump's). Clinton/Trump was 65M/62M. Unless Trump's numbers were rapaciously Russian-ified, he still put in a solid showing with voluntary voters. Trump's appeal was his unorthodox, un-polished dog-whistle politics, and his faithful lapped up his 'tell-it-like-it-is' approach, even if the 'like-it-is' part was fabricated out of whole cloth.
kafkaesq 10y ago
The new management of the agencies want to review the social media policies. With the aim of installing Orwellian-style thought control practices† at every level, affecting every last publicity statement, blog post, and tweet. You forgot that part. † Based on what his press secretary (and other lackeys) attempted to have us believe about the size of the inaugural day crowds (and the millions of people who voted fraudulently in the past election) -- in addition to things Trump himself has said about climate change, and a whole bunch of other issues -- that's not hyperbole; that's quite literally what's happening.
- jquery 10y ago
  This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? I don't see what's Orwellian about it. Presidents have always controlled the official department media their agencies put out.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? It's the aims of the control, and the utter brazenness with which the new administration attempts to manipulate facts and reality in general that are different. There's never been an administration (well, maybe in the 19th century; but I mean, not since the dawn of modern journalistic reporting) that blatantly and transparently lied about such publicly known and immediately fact-checkable things as crowd sizes on inaugural day. I don't see what's Orwellian about it. This morning the press secretary asked you -- yes, you -- to not see anything wrong with the fact that President still believes that "millions of people voted illegally" in the last election. And that he has "studies and evidence" on which he bases that belief. You don't see anything Orwellian about that?
    - ColanR 10y ago
      Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. If your source on disproving the "millions of illegal votes" is one of the same sources that thought Hillary was going to win in a landslide, then you have nothing to say. I'm not going to say I agree there were illegal votes, but I am holding out for better evidence.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
Except that there is no management, because they haven't staffed the administration as fast as usual, so they just put out a gag order instead of risking someone going "off message". It's incompetence coupled with ineptitude.
px1999 10y ago
I've worked in government (thankfully not US federal) and when departments review their specific operations/policies, they rarely grind to a halt, it's business as usual while things get evaluated/decided and policies built behind the scenes. The only reason that you'd do something this public is to make it a spectacle and give people the impression that you're doing important busy work at all levels; or to try to assert/show dominance.
dashundchen 10y ago
Except it's not just social media: It's freezing the grants and business of the EPA. [1] It's stopping the publication of federal ag research [2] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/23/trump-administration-tells-epa-to-freeze-all-grants-contracts/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-business%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.ca10b4006729 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-usda-idUSKBN1582OB http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-usda-idUSKBN1582...

Here's an explanation--the new management of the agencies want to review the social media policies.

Avshalom 10y ago

> social media policies social media policies is sci-fi way of saying "people saying things" though.

barney54 10y ago
True, but this isn't a case of people speaking from their own point of view. The social media account represent the Departments in an official capacity.
- joshkpeterson 10y ago
  This is great and all, but climate change is going to kill a lot of people so......

cyberferret 10y ago

In my line of business, I get to inherit web and mobile apps from other developers all the time. One thing I never do is to completely shut down the app and take it offline while I scour through the code to ensure everything is ok. Not unless there is a glaring problem or security hole that is already evident. It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche...

loafa 10y ago
Fair enough, but the EPA twitter account isn't exactly mission-critical for anyone, it can afford to not tweet for a little while. Also I don't think it's particularly ironic that the President of the United States gets certain privileges which his subordinates don't.
- fpgeek 10y ago
  Except, in the general case, that isn't true. Many of the Park Service social media accounts that were shut down do disseminate emergency information. That part of the "shutdown" was rolled back once the issues were understood, but in the interim those kinds of Twitter feeds were pointing people to their Facebook page for up-to-date information. I guess we're lucky that no one included Facebook in the shutdown order and even luckier that there was no relevant emergency while the social media policy was being clarified.
vacri 10y ago
> It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche... Kind've, kind've not. If you're a government agency and you employ a new staffer outside of PR, you're not expecting them to tweet stream-of-consciousness. Trump, on the other hand, was largely elected because he did do this and it's expected of him.
- facetube 10y ago
  What evidence is there of this? From this vantage point, it looks like he was elected despite his Twitter falsehoods (read: lies) and stream-of-(un)consciousness, not because of it. He lost the popular vote by three million votes. He is historically unpopular.
  - vacri 10y ago
    He did lose the popular vote, and I'm definitely not a Trump apologist. But however you want to carve it, over 60 million people got out there on election day(-ish) and spent effort to vote for him in a non-compulsory election. I'm first in line to criticise the primitive Electoral College, the cancerous state of US gerrymandering, and the vapidity of the two-party tribal system, but voter turnout was high. Bush and Gore each got 50M votes in the 2000 election. Obama/McCain was 70M/60M (also: McCain's loss was much greater than Trump's). Clinton/Trump was 65M/62M. Unless Trump's numbers were rapaciously Russian-ified, he still put in a solid showing with voluntary voters. Trump's appeal was his unorthodox, un-polished dog-whistle politics, and his faithful lapped up his 'tell-it-like-it-is' approach, even if the 'like-it-is' part was fabricated out of whole cloth.

kafkaesq 10y ago

The new management of the agencies want to review the social media policies. With the aim of installing Orwellian-style thought control practices† at every level, affecting every last publicity statement, blog post, and tweet. You forgot that part. † Based on what his press secretary (and other lackeys) attempted to have us believe about the size of the inaugural day crowds (and the millions of people who voted fraudulently in the past election) -- in addition to things Trump himself has said about climate change, and a whole bunch of other issues -- that's not hyperbole; that's quite literally what's happening.

jquery 10y ago
This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? I don't see what's Orwellian about it. Presidents have always controlled the official department media their agencies put out.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? It's the aims of the control, and the utter brazenness with which the new administration attempts to manipulate facts and reality in general that are different. There's never been an administration (well, maybe in the 19th century; but I mean, not since the dawn of modern journalistic reporting) that blatantly and transparently lied about such publicly known and immediately fact-checkable things as crowd sizes on inaugural day. I don't see what's Orwellian about it. This morning the press secretary asked you -- yes, you -- to not see anything wrong with the fact that President still believes that "millions of people voted illegally" in the last election. And that he has "studies and evidence" on which he bases that belief. You don't see anything Orwellian about that?
  - ColanR 10y ago
    Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. If your source on disproving the "millions of illegal votes" is one of the same sources that thought Hillary was going to win in a landslide, then you have nothing to say. I'm not going to say I agree there were illegal votes, but I am holding out for better evidence.

nikdaheratik 10y ago

Except that there is no management, because they haven't staffed the administration as fast as usual, so they just put out a gag order instead of risking someone going "off message". It's incompetence coupled with ineptitude.

px1999 10y ago

I've worked in government (thankfully not US federal) and when departments review their specific operations/policies, they rarely grind to a halt, it's business as usual while things get evaluated/decided and policies built behind the scenes. The only reason that you'd do something this public is to make it a spectacle and give people the impression that you're doing important busy work at all levels; or to try to assert/show dominance.

dashundchen 10y ago

Except it's not just social media: It's freezing the grants and business of the EPA. [1] It's stopping the publication of federal ag research [2] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/23/trump-administration-tells-epa-to-freeze-all-grants-contracts/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-business%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.ca10b4006729 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-usda-idUSKBN1582OB http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-usda-idUSKBN1582...