Obama White House loves BlackBerry but bars Twitter
Barack Obama's White House, home of the famously BlackBerrying president and first lady, has blocked online access to Twitter. — White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made the admission today (see C-SPAN video below) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Obama's Twitter presence has been fading since before he took office: the campaign account went silent within days of the November 2008 election, and by February 2009 reporting had already concluded that the president had abandoned Twitter entirely. What Robert Gibbs admitted on C-SPAN today closes the loop — this was not neglect but policy: the White House network simply does not allow access to the service.
The admission lands awkwardly against the same month's news cycle. The president and first lady are confirmed devoted BlackBerry users, an exception carved out of strict security rules — yet Twitter, the service his campaign made famous, sits on the blocked list even as a cyber czar appointment is rumored for this week and leaked internal Twitter documents have just exposed how little control companies have over data stored in the cloud.
First-order effects
- White House staff cannot read or post to Twitter from office machines, so any official tweeting must happen off-network or through sanctioned exceptions like the president's BlackBerry.
- Gibbs's public confirmation turns what staff may have treated as routine IT filtering into a stated administration position on consumer social tools.
Second-order effects
- Agencies and other elected officials' offices look to White House practice as the template, so expect similar block-or-allow decisions to harden across government networks rather than be left to individual offices.
- The split between the president's permitted BlackBerry and the blocked network pressures vendors of secure mobile and messaging tools to position themselves as the compliant path into government, while services like Twitter must argue their way past security reviewers.
Third-order effects
- Government communication is settling into a two-tier structure: tightly controlled, archivable official channels inside the network, with informal social media treated as a security liability by default — a divide that will need explicit policy, not ad-hoc exceptions, as consumer tools proliferate.
- If the pattern holds, presidential technology itself becomes a negotiated exception — each new device or service requiring a case-by-case security ruling rather than being assumed available.
The trend: As social platforms become mainstream communication channels, security-driven institutions like the White House are defaulting to blocking them, forcing officials to negotiate exceptions one device at a time.