Down the memory hole: White House purges all Bush-era Twitter posts

Why not? Nothing existed before the dawn of Hopenchange. Except, of course, for the stuff we need to prosecute people for. Oh, and stuff Obama can use to shift blame whenever he wants to remind people that he inherited a problem from the previous administration.

Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama’s tweets, in its cache.

Valleywag alum Paul Boutin suggests on Gadgetwise that this is a simple rationalization of accounts, matching the definite-article-free “whitehouse” username the Obama team uses on Flickr and YouTube. But Obama’s Twitterers didn’t just change the username on the account; they started fresh, wiping out all of the White House’s existing Twitter followers, and the entire archive of messages.

As Tanya, one of our Greenroom contributors, noted in the comments in Headlines, Team Barry could have simply asked Twitter to archive the Bush-era Tweets under a different username. No need to mass-delete. It seems so petty that I’m inclined to believe it’s the handiwork of a young/dopey staffer who wanted to hit the ground running on Inauguration Day and didn’t pause to think. Why would they be so hot to flush Twitter posts, of all things? Surely The One’s egomania doesn’t extend that far? Does it?

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