White House releases new Obama social media archive tools

The Obama administration’s social media archive plan includes everything from GIFs to Vines, the White House revealed Thursday.

In a post, the White House shared links to several platforms that allow users to access a history Obama’s posts during his time in the White House. Some of the sites included Giphy, which archived every GIF image ever used by the White House, and ArchiveSocial’s searchable database of every White House social media post.

The White House’s Twitter, Facebook and Vine posts are also available for anyone to download in their entirety and use to create their own data and archival projects.

{mosads}Not all of the tools are purely archival. One, created MIT Media Lab’s Electome group, analyzed Obama’s tweets and categorized them into policy categories, tracking them against 2016 election discourse on Twitter. The charts highlight discrepancies between the president’s tweets and other tweets in areas like healthcare and employment.

The charts reveal Obama’s tweets focusing on these things much more than other politically focused Twitter users. 2016 political Twitter users did, however, spend a lot more time than Obama tweeting about foreign policy and national security matters.

In October, the White House announced its initial plans for its digital archival project, which included housing all of the president’s tweets on the Twitter account @POTUS44.

Obama has been called the first “Twitter president” after maintaining a much more robust digital presence than his predecessors. Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Vine and GIFs came to prominence during presidency.