{"id":14113,"date":"2017-12-26T14:56:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-26T22:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/library-of-congress-will-no-longer-archive-every-tweet\/"},"modified":"2017-12-26T14:56:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T22:56:00","slug":"library-of-congress-will-no-longer-archive-every-tweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/library-of-congress-will-no-longer-archive-every-tweet\/","title":{"rendered":"Library Of Congress Will No Longer Archive Every Tweet"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Laurel Wamsley<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n The Library of Congress said on Tuesday that it will no longer archive every public tweet. Instead it will collect them “on a very selective basis.”<\/p>\n

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Karen Bleier\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Karen Bleier\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Since 2010, Library of Congress has been archiving every single public tweet: Yours, ours, the president’s.<\/p>\n

But today, the institution announced<\/a> it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true<\/a>“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”<\/p>\n

The library says it began archiving tweets “for the same reason it collects other materials \u2013 to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people.” The archive stretches back to Twitter’s beginning, in 2006.<\/p>\n

But as anyone who’s been following along can attest, Twitter and the way it’s used has changed since then. First and foremost from a collection perspective: the sheer number of tweets.<\/p>\n

“The volume of tweets and related transactions has evolved and increased dramatically since the initial agreement was signed,” the library explains<\/a> in a white paper accompanying the announcement.<\/p>\n

The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets<\/a>, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.<\/p>\n