As I previously reported the National Weather service has banned social media usage by its employees to share weather related information.
After a post where I highlighted how useful Twitter and certain NWS related accounts were during a tornado outbreak we saw the twitter accounts go dark and blog posts deleted. A couple of weeks later we got word that the NWS issued a memo banning social media usage. At the time I was only able to verbally confirm it’s existence and the NWS would only state that there was no policy change. We didn’t have hard evidence of the memo… till now.
Here is the memo obtained via FOIA request.
National Weather Service Social Media Memo 051310
There has been plenty of discussion already about the pros & cons of this policy and while I hope that the NWS is serious about exploring social media to share weather related info I’m still a critic of their current policy. I’ve got more docs and links that I’ll share later (I’m on vacation) but I wanted to get the memo up.
