The National Park Service was banned from using its Twitter account after it posted two retweets criticizing President Trump.
The first post was a retweet of a New York Times report highlighting the disparity in the crowd sizes of the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations. The other retweet pointed to an article in Esquire, with the headline “Civil rights, climate change, and health care scrubbed clean from White House website. Not a trace.”
The retweets were deleted a few hours after they went live.
It’s worth noting that it is standard procedure for the White House to scrub the contents of its website upon the transition to a new administration, and the older contents are archived for public viewing, so raising the alarm in such a way could be seen as fearmongering.
In contrast to the National Park Service account, other official government accounts issued their congratulations and notices promoting the nation’s 45th president.
In an internal e-mail obtained by Gizmodo, the NPS was ordered by its Washington support office to cease and desist its activities. A portion of the government memo reads:
PWR parks that use Twitter as part of their crisis communications plans need to alter their contingency plans to accommodate this requirement. Please ensure all scheduled posts are deleted and automated cross-platform social media connections to your twitter accounts are severed. The expectation is that there will be absolutely no posts to Twitter.
In summary, this Twitter stand down means we will cease use of Twitter immediately. However, there is no need to suspend or delete government accounts until directed.
The account has since tweeted an apology for the RTs, and is presumably under new management.
We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you pic.twitter.com/mctNNvlrmv
— NationalParkService (@NatlParkService) January 21, 2017