Twitter ain't off the record

From Benson, aka @desertronin.

It was discussing if a Capitol Hill staffer can expect his tweets to be off the record just by declaring it to be so in his bio on Twitter.

Farrauto put up a sentence on his Twitter account stating that all of his “musings” are off of the record. It’s like standing in the middle of a room of people, some of whom are his friends and others of whom are reporters, and shouting at the top of his lungs, then not expecting the reporters to write about any stupid things he said.

Anything you say in a publicly available place is on the record.

And anything that you put on Twitter from a non-private account is public. It's searchable, you can find everything on Google, on Twitter's search engine... so to think that by slapping up a disclaimer saying your publicly available "musings" are off the record is almost as funny as the press releases I constantly receive that have this disclaimer at the end:

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail,including all attachments is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review,use,disclosure or distribution is prohibited unless specifically provided under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and destroy all copies of this message

Sorry, Farrauto, anything you say in public is on the record.

And if your tweets are not protected, then they are completely public.

As the Washington City Paper put it:

You cannot speak into a microphone and be off the record at the same time. Those two things are incompatible and should never be attempted.

Twitter is just another kind of microphone, a internet-based, 140-character microphone.