Outside the Beltway

Barack Obama, First Tweeter

Doug Mataconis · Saturday, June 18, 2011 · 2 comments

Starting very soon, the President of the United States will be tweeting on his own:

U.S. President Barack Obama will start regularly tweeting from his official Twitter account.

In an update today, it was announced that the President’s reelection staff would be managing his social media presence and accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

A rep also revealed that the Commander In Chief would be penning tweets of his own and that “on Twitter, tweets from the President will be signed ‘-BO.'”

The @BarackObama account has been active since 2007, when Obama was using social media in his campaign for the presidency.

However, as the account began accumulating updates in 2009, we discovered that the President’s staff, not the President himself, was actually posting the tweets.

Here’s what it says on the President’s re-election website:

Starting today, you’ll notice something new about President Obama’s Facebook page and his Twitter account, @BarackObama.

Obama for America staff will now be managing both accounts, posting daily updates from the campaign trail, from Washington, and everywhere in between. You’ll be hearing from President Obama regularly, too; on Twitter, tweets from the President will be signed “-BO.”

Why make the change?

As the President said when he launched this campaign a few months ago, he’s focused on doing the job we elected him to do — so he’s counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up, helping to shape it as it grows.

One way we’re putting that idea into practice is by taking the reins of these Facebook and Twitter accounts. This change will give us new opportunities to make the most of these channels, using them not only to report what the President is doing every day but to connect to the millions of supporters who will be driving this campaign. We’ll be asking for your feedback and ideas, updating you on ways to get involved, sharing the best stories that cross our desks, and maybe even retweeting you every now and again.

Making the Twitter and Facebook accounts campaign property means that they won’t be subject to the record keeping provisions of the Presidential Records Act. That Act, however, probably also means that it’s unlikely that any Tweets we see that are signed “BO” (I think they should’ve made the signature BHO myself, not the least to make clear that it isn’t Bo The White House Dog doing the tweeting) were actually sent by the President since his government-provided Blackberry is subject to the act and probably doesn’t even have internet access.

Most likely, these are things that will be composed by the President, and entered by staff.  Nonetheless, I trust that the President will take the Anthony Weiner incident to heart and be careful about his late night tweeting.