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White House Eases Restrictions on Social Media, Gets Facebookin'

by Amar Toor on April 8, 2010 at 10:55 AM

As part of President Obama's ongoing efforts to enhance political transparency, the White House yesterday relaxed archaic restrictions governing federal communication with citizens, effectively allowing -- and encouraging -- federal agencies to use social media more freely. In a document titled "Social Media, Web-Based Interactive Technologies, and the Paperwork Reduction Act," the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) outlines the ways in which federal agencies can use social media to engage the public within the framework of the existing Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). The PRA was originally enacted in 1995, when the Internet wasn't nearly as pervasive as it is today. As the Washington Post explains, the policy requires federal officials to submit an official form every time they gather information from the public, in order to justify the effort. The forms, though, can take months to fully process, which is a major reason for the White House's clarification.

Under the revised policy, federal agencies are now free to use social media to gather opinions from and engage in dialogue with citizens without having to go through the trouble of officially archiving everything, as the PRA mandates. In the document, OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein argues that blogs and social networks are essentially equivalent to "public meetings," and thus shouldn't be included under the PRA. Sunstein pointed out, however, that exemption from PRA mandates is still dependent upon how the information is collected, and the nature of the communication. Federal wiki pages, for example, are outside of PRA requirements, but in the event that any wiki is used to conduct surveys or collect information by asking people identical questions, the agents behind the survey would still be subject to PRA regulation.

In essence, then, the Obama administration's revision of the PRA clarifies the line separating casual conversation from explicit information mining. It's obvious that any outdated policy pertaining to government communication can have a negative impact on how we interact with our political leaders. The White House's decision to brush aside the remaining procedural barriers that could hamper otherwise fluid digital dialogue, then, is certainly a welcomed one. [From: TechPresident and The Washington Post]

Tags: facebook, obama, ObamaAdministration, oira, paperreductionact, politics, pra, SocialMedia, socialnetworking, top, twitter, WhiteHouse

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