Since
January 2012, Dr Manmohan Singh, the outgoing prime minister of India,
has regaled the 1.24 million followers of the prime minister’s official
account on Twitter with blurry photographs, links to turgid Press Information Bureau releases, and festive tidings. No more.
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Today,
in one of the final acts of the outgoing government, the prime
minister’s office changed the name of its Twitter account from @PMOIndia
to @PMOIndiaArchive and put it in cold storage. The next prime
minister, Narendra Modi, will have to build his own following.
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Modi’s Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) did not react kindly to the sudden change, ranting
about the loss of a “national digital asset”:
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No
one ever accused the BJP of subtlety, nor the Indian National Congress
of good grace, but the unedifying spectacle does raise a
serious question: What do you do when it is time to transfer ownership
of a Twitter account?
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When
David Cameron became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2010, his
office changed the name of the official Twitter account from @downingstreet to @number10gov.
But he took past tweets and followers along with him. The change had
more to do with consistent branding across platforms than political
point scoring, a Number 10 spokesman told the Guardian at the time. Perhaps mindful of the potential for conflict, Cameron’s team also set up a personal account, from which Cameron the Conservative politician could tweet things that Cameron the British prime minister could not.
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The situation is similar in Russia: The Kremlin maintains an English language Twitter account for the presidency, while Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have their own accounts. The problem has yet to arise in the US. The White House Twitter account was created only in 2009, well after George W. Bush had left office. Barack Obama also maintains his own account, which has far more followers.
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One account, two men
But
what about when there is no division between the man and the
institution? The Vatican set a good example when Pope Benedict XVI
stepped down at the end of February. According to the Catholic Telegraph,
the Vatican’s digital office immediately deleted all his tweets and
signposted the position as vacant, pending a new Pope (who now tweets prolifically). The deleted tweets survive on a Vatican-hosted page, ensuring both the continuity of Pontifex’s Twitter account as well as an archive of earlier tweets.
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Anyone can do this: Twitter provides an fully functional archive
in HTML format to all its users. The wise thing for the Indian prime
minister’s office to have done woud have been to create a separate
archive, delete all past tweets on the official account, and hand over
the keys. But then familiarity with technology was never the outgoing
government’s strong suit: the disputed @PMOIndia Twitter account had
1.24 million followers. Modi’s personal account is followed by 4.23 million people.
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