AGENCY TESTIMONY
Commissioner Pauline Toole testifies on social media archiving bill
0:35:25
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4 min
Commissioner Pauline Toole of the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) testifies on a proposed local law requiring elected officials and agencies to notify DORIS of all social media accounts annually. She discusses the department's current practices in harvesting and archiving social media posts as government records, and suggests amendments to the proposed legislation to ensure effective data collection.
- DORIS currently maintains an archive of over 31 million social media records from various platforms.
- The department suggests amending the bill to require more detailed information about social media accounts, not just the account name.
- Toole emphasizes the importance of social media archives for future researchers studying this period in history.
Pauline Toole
0:35:25
Thank you very much, Joe.
0:35:28
Good morning.
0:35:30
My name is Pauline Tull, and I serve as the commissioner of the Department of Records And Information Services known as Doris.
0:35:37
Thank you to chair wrestler and the members of the committee for the opportunity to talk today about the proposed local law to require elected officials and agencies to notify Doris of all social media accounts on an annual basis.
0:35:52
This administration is committed to ensuring that government is open festival and transparent, which enables meaningful engagement between residents of New York City And City Government.
0:36:03
Providing access to government records helps accomplish that goal.
0:36:07
The proposed local law amends the city to require that Doris maintain a publicly accessible and searchable online database of the official social media posts and websites of government officials.
0:36:20
It also admin amend the administrative code to mandate that the city's elected officials in agencies provide Doris with a list of each official social media account annually.
0:36:31
In essence, the proposal codifies our existing practice of harvesting and making available official social media posts and quire's additional content.
0:36:41
I testified on this legislation in the fall of 2023, and we do appreciate the council's focus on gathering and making available all city government social media posts.
0:36:53
It's important to understand that these posts will be useful for future researchers who want to document the zeitgeist at this particular time in our history.
0:37:02
Social media posts are government records.
0:37:06
Websites are official government records under the definition in the city charter.
0:37:11
They have a permanent retention period.
0:37:13
And because they were published online, they become part of the collection at the municipal library division of Doris.
0:37:21
Already, we have 31,783,698 records on our social media archive as of September 13th.
0:37:33
This includes though the comments mention mentions direct messages in addition to the posts made by official agency account holders, which number a little over 3,000,000.
0:37:46
The vast majority of the posts in the archive are from Twitter with close to 2,000,000 of the posts followed by Facebook.
0:37:54
Our vendor harvests from 9 platforms currently, which are listed in the testimony, but it also has content from platforms that are outmoded or or or less frequently used, such as Google plus or flicker.
0:38:11
City agencies currently provide information to doors, the name of the platform, the account, contact information for the person managing the account.
0:38:20
And so when the name of a new account is add it, the algorithm at our vendor will pull content from that account even if it existed for years before we were made made aware of its existence.
0:38:34
In order to harm the social media posts, the vendor requires certain information to make sure the posts aren't being harvested in a inappropriate way.
0:38:44
So obtaining that information, which includes the name of the account, the platform, the contact person, etcetera, is really the most challenging part of having this social media archive.
0:38:56
So I think our suggestion with this bill is that requiring only the name of the account will not allow us to harvest the content effective So we are suggesting an amendment to the legislation that would require information about social media accounts, official social media accounts to be provided annually as the bill require on a form designated by doors, which would allow us to add other pieces of information as the vendor or new vendors require that in order to harvest things.
0:39:29
And I think we could also stipulate that at a minimum would include the social media account name and contact person.
0:39:38
And then as previously confirmed at the November hearing, posting a link to our harvesting vendor site meets the goals of this bill.
0:39:47
So we commend the counsel for its focus on records retention and preservation, and we'll take questions you may have in a minute, and I will now pass it over to Laura Rengelheim, executive deputy the commissioner of internal operations at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.
