Tools & Guides
Government social media is a public record in every state. Learn what you need to capture, what you need to retain, and what you may need to produce.
Government social media activity is subject to public records law in all fifty states. That covers your posts, the comments underneath them, the replies your team wrote back, content that was edited after publishing, and content that was taken down.
The channel doesn't change the obligation. If it would be a record in an email, it's a record in a comment thread.
The Freedom of Information Act is a federal law covering federal agencies. It does not apply to cities, counties, school districts, or special districts.
When someone requests records from your government, your obligation comes from your state's public records law. Every state has one, and almost none of them share a name. Some use Freedom of Information in the title, which is where most of the confusion starts. Others use Public Records, Open Records, Sunshine, or Right to Know, and a number use names that follow no pattern at all.
Most requestors will call it a FOIA request regardless. That's fine, and it changes nothing. A request is valid based on what it asks for, not what the requestor calls it.
Most records request guidance assumes the responsive material is documents. Increasingly, it isn't.
A request for “all communications about the rezoning” reaches the Facebook post announcing the hearing, the comments underneath it, the replies your team wrote back, the version that was edited after a typo was caught, and the post that came down an hour later. All of it is responsive. None of it is sitting in a folder.
Four categories are the ones teams routinely miss:
Resident comments on a government post are generally part of the record, and in many states so is your decision to hide or remove one.
Replies sent from the government account are government communications, including replies sent from a phone at nine on a Friday night.
The version that existed before the edit, and the post that no longer exists, are both still responsive. Deletion is not a records strategy, and in several states it carries its own exposure.
Timestamps, which account published, and edit history are increasingly treated as part of the record rather than as technical detail, particularly where courts have addressed electronic records directly.
Screenshots are the most common approach and the least defensible one.
They don't carry metadata, so they can't establish when something was published or by whom. They can't capture what was deleted before anyone thought to capture it. They have no chain of custody, which is what a court asks about when authenticity is challenged. And they require someone to have anticipated which post would matter, months before the request arrived.
Reconstructing a channel by scrolling back through it isn't a defensible search. It also isn't a search most teams can finish inside the window their statute allows.
Regardless of which statute governs you, the same practices hold up under scrutiny:
Naming is the surface difference. These are the ones that change how your team works a request.
Requirements range from a year to seven or more depending on the state and the record type. Your retention schedule for social media should match the one you already apply to other communications records.
There is no national standard. Some states set a deadline in business days, some use language like "reasonable time," and a few set none at all. Deadlines also differ in what they require, since acknowledging a request, determining whether responsive records exist, and producing them are often three separate obligations.
Some states grant access to any person. Others limit the right to residents. If your state has an eligibility rule, put it on your public-facing records page.
Fee rules vary in what they cover: copying, staff time, technology costs, or some combination. A published fee schedule and written estimates before work begins prevent most disputes about cost.
This page is general information, not legal advice. Public records law varies by state and changes over time. Consult your own counsel before setting or changing your organization's records policy.
CivArchive captures your social media continuously, with the metadata and deletion history a complete response needs. See how it works for your team.
