Library of Congress

On April 14^th the Library of Congress sent out an official tweet that would stir the masses: "Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive - ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow." Twitter's millions of users send out more than 50 million tweets each day, all 140 characters or less. These snap-shots into everyday life are about to become part of human-kind's cultural history. The Library of Congress, whose goal has long been to preserve the "universal body of human knowledge", intends these posts, from Obama announcing his presidential victory to the musings of a teenager in the American Midwest, to provide insight to future generations about our culture.

The web-capture will include every public tweet since March 2006. Private tweets and direct messages will be exempt since they were never meant for public viewing. There will also be restrictions on the use of archived tweets. According to the Twitter blog, archived tweets will be available for internal library use, non-commercial research, and public display only after a six month delay.

For Tweeters this means that your every tweeted-thought will be available for future generations to study. But is this an invasion of privacy? The library of congress says ‘no', it is a preservation of culture. It will highlight only those tweets that it believes have strong cultural significance. The tweets are expected to capture a moment in history, similar to the letters and journals of the past, which the Library has been archiving for 210 years. Besides, each twitter user agreed to the terms and conditions of Twitter which means that Twitter, rather than the authors, own every tweet on the network. Twitter is therefore well within their rights to donate the tweets to the Library of congress.

As of now, there is nothing that can be done to have your tweets removed from this web-capture project if you, for whatever reason, want your tweets excluded.  However, you can set your profile to private to prevent any future tweets from being archived.

One possible effect of archiving all public tweets: Maybe people will start thinking before they post. "After all," as Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer at Yale Laws School notes, "your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students."