Someday the Cheeto's tweetstorms will be in the Library of Congress

[dalton99a]

2. If there is funding to sort out the mess

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/

No engineers are permanently assigned to the project. So, for now, staff regularly dump unprocessed tweets into a server—the digital equivalent of throwing a bunch of paperclipped manuscripts into a chest and giving it a good shake. There’s certainly no way to search through all that they’ve collected. And, in the meantime, the value of a vast tweet cache has soared. This frustrates researchers, who had hoped to mine the archive for insights about language and society—and who currently have to pay heavy licensing fees to Twitter for its data.

The library has been handed a Gordian knot, an engineering, cyber, and policy challenge that grows bigger and more complicated every day—about 500 million tweets a day more complicated. Will the library finally untie it—or give in and cut the thing off?