Obama really doesn't want you to forget all his awesome tweets
The White House reveals ways you'll be able to search through two terms of tweets, GIFs, Facebook posts, Instagram shots and other social media offerings.
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All of President Barack Obama's tweets, Facebook posts and other social media snapshots have been archived in a searchable database.
Here's some advice. Consider everything you post on social media to be public, especially if you're the president of the United States.
You can now search through eight years of tweets, GIFs, Facebook posts, Instagram shots and other social media offerings from President Barack Obama and his administration in the Obama White House Social Media Archive. The archive, hosted by platform ArchiveSocial, contains more than 250,000 posts, photos and videos shared by more than 100 official White House social media accounts.
A quick search for "Michelle" in the archive surfaced more than 3,000 results, though you can refine your search by social platform, date range and even specific account.
"We feel we have created something special," said ArchiveSocial CEO Anil Chawla.
The archive is just one of the ways the Obama administration's digital history is being preserved. Back in October, the White House announced its digital transition plan, which includes things like collecting all of the @POTUS tweets and putting them under a Twitter handle, @POTUS44. The administration also asked for ideas to preserve the social media data and open it to the public.
The online archive lets you filter results by account, social platform and date range.
In a blog post Thursday, the White House shared several of those archival projects. In addition to the Obama White House Social Media Archive, Giphy launched a page that includes all the GIFs the White House has ever shared, a collection of the White House's Vines, and other White House related GIFs curated by the site. The Twitter account @Relive44 will republish White House tweets over the next eight years to mark significant moments of the Obama administration. The account plans to kick things off on May 1, to line up with the president's first tweet on May 1, 2009.
Of course, Obama isn't the only one with a database of tweets. There's already a searchable archive of tweets from President-elect Donald Trump's account, @realdonaldtrump. The site's home page highlights 235 tweets from Trump that include the word "loser." A search for "loser" in the Obama White House archive returned eight results.