If you want a guaranteed place in the historical record, tweet now or forever hold your peace.
For the last several years, the Library of Congress has archived nearly every tweet ever made. But this practice will soon come to an end, as the Library of Congress announced Tuesday that it would end its blanket collection of tweets at the beginning of the new year, The Hill reports.
Back in 2010, when Twitter was not an omnipresent part of the human experience, the Library of Congress and Twitter agreed to create an archive of all publicly available tweets to capture "the emergence of online social media." In a press release, the library said Tuesday that "the nature of Twitter has changed" and cited Twitter's new 280-character limit, an increased frequency of tweeting, and the rise of non-text tweets to conclude that nearly 12 years of tweets — from Twitter's inception in 2006 until the end of 2017 — is more than enough for future scholars to pore through.
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The library is now only interested in tweets with "event-based" merit or tweets related to "themes of ongoing national interest." Tweets about your annoying little brother or what you had for lunch are thus no longer fit for the nation's digital archives.
There is however, one small flaw in the collection process; the Library of Congress only takes text-based tweets, so posts like President Trump's recent retweet of a bloodied CNN logo splattered on his shoe don't make the cut.
