The second US presidential social media transition: How private platforms impact the digital preservation of public records

A second presidential social media transition in the United States occurred as Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021. In the years since Barack Obama pioneered the use of platforms like Facebook and Twitter while President, Donald Trump shaped his Presidency around the use of Twitter, primarily through a personal account created before entering politics. In this paper, we examine Donald Trump's use of Twitter during his presidency as a lens through which to understand the ongoing archival preservation and data management challenges posed by social media platforms. The blurred lines between public and private records, deleting tweets, and the preservation issues that appeared after his suspension from Twitter and other platforms following the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol all highlight an urgent, ongoing need by archivists, digital preservationists, and information scholars to consider how we might collect and manage social media records in an ever-changing information landscape. This paper draws primarily on publicly available information from existing preservation initiatives to analyze the state of digital preservation for presidential records. Our findings highlight how both public and private entities manage and provide access to Donald Trump's tweets, pointing to broader implications for social media data preservation.