The Library of Congress will soon have full access to all tweets since the dawn of twime

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

via loc.gov

The paranoid delusional in me gets freaked out about this stuff. After watching the Century of the Self (which you should watch too for your own damn good), I view this data acquisition with a TREMENDOUS amount skepticism.

While the Library of Congress blog entry spins this as an impressive movement to record the whole of U.S. history, I view this acquisition as an extension of opinion polling. When the U.S. government has this data, they will have the ability to match up opinion trends discovered in the millions of users on Twitter across the entire globe with government policy decisions and use that information to guide future policy. Data is ammunition, data is power. Power corrupts.

According to Twitter’s blog post about this, data will only be available to the Library after the tweets are six months old.

Now that every single waking thought that you post to Twitter will be stored by the U.S. government until the end of eternity, how will you change what you post? Will you change anything at all?