Brazil begins to preserve historical virtual archives – 01/21/2024 – Power

Although government officials make announcements and post information related to their position on their social media accounts every day, in general, this data is not being preserved as a public document.

Marked by the intense use of these platforms, including for campaigns to attack other Powers and disinformation, the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) illustrates the importance of this issue being addressed.

Today, when opening the Presidency Library page, where archives of former presidents are located, you can find the few interviews given by Bolsonaro throughout his term and his official statements. The weekly lives broadcast on your personal channels are also not there. The same goes for your tweets or Facebook posts.

The content that was sent to the National Archives, as his private collection, does not include materials from his personal accounts, as the organization informed the Sheet. The Presidency’s Secom also said that posts on the former president’s personal networks are not part of the current administration’s official files.

If the platforms that currently exist one day cease to exist, or the content posted by Bolsonaro is eventually deleted, including by himself or the networks, it is uncertain how much of this material will be preserved and accessible in other media.

Although Bolsonaro’s personal profiles were not saved, according to Secom, the posts from institutional accounts were preserved, and remain online in full, on the profiles of Secom, the Government of Brazil and the Presidency — also materials from institutional websites were saved. There are no further details, however, about the methods used.

Preserving the memory of a post on a social network, in a contextualized way, may involve saving engagement data – which may be unfeasible depending on the limitations of each platform.

Brazil is still in its infancy on the topic, but a first step was taken at the end of last year, when two resolutions on the topic were published by Conarq (National Archives Council).

In countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, for example, national archives projects have preserved and allowed access to profiles linked to the government on some social networks. In the first, website archiving has occurred since 2003.

This debate involves not only the historical dimension and access to public information, but also the guarantee of rights, as information disseminated on the networks can serve, for example, as evidence in legal proceedings.

One of Conarq’s new resolutions establishes a policy for preserving public administration websites and social media and the minimum requirements that must be observed in this type of archiving, such as deciding what to keep and what to ignore.

They guide both the National Archives and also state and municipal public archives – government documents that are permanent and cannot be deleted go to this type of archive.

Among the relevant requirements are the authenticity and integrity of the records – aspects of extreme importance in a context in which the advancement of technology even allows the creation of deepfakes – and the guarantee that it will still be possible to access this data many decades from now.

A point not yet specifically addressed in these policies is whether the personal accounts of public authorities would have an institutional or personal nature, and whether, therefore, they should be archived.

The documents are signed by the president of Conarq, Ana Flávia Magalhães, who is also the current director-general of the National Archives – an organization that is part of the Ministry of Management and Innovation.

Published last December, the resolutions were approved at the end of 2022, and prepared by a technical chamber established in 2021. According to the body, the delay in publication was essentially due to a change in management and bureaucratic procedures.

“The National Archive, which must collect from the Federal Executive [os materiais das redes sociais e sites]you need to create strategies, implement this resolution, these guidelines, and start collecting”, says Neide de Sordi, who was director of the organization during part of the Bolsonaro administration and who signed the ordinance establishing the group that created the resolution.

Neide states, however, that among the obstacles are the team and budget limitations of public archives. According to her, the very work to preserve paper and digital documents produced by the government bureaucracy is already a challenge.

Juliano Balbon, head of the Document Management Division of the Public Archive of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, states that the organization has been running a project focused on digital, which has as one of its objectives that government websites and social networks become be preserved, but this is not yet in operation.

He states that it is necessary to establish procedures for storing, curating, preserving and accessing this information.

Thiago Nicodemo, coordinator of the São Paulo Public Archive, in turn, understands the importance of the topic and is interested in acting in this direction, but says that the organization’s priority today is to progress the work to preserve the state documents that are created electronically [nato-digitais] or digitized. Furthermore, it points out that today this would not be an explicit competence of the Archive in the state.

As the preservation of state memory itself is already a challenge, other elements of current life are also at risk of perishing, such as several records of the January 8th attacks that were erased by the invaders.

Ian Kisil Marino, historian and researcher at the Center for Digital Humanities at Unicamp, sees the risk, for example, that several reports about the pandemic currently hosted on social media profiles or other websites end up lost, without the same type of effort being made to archive them. as in other countries.

He points out that it is still important to reflect on the importance of preserving fake news. “Brazil is one of the largest populations in the world and has experienced a denialist government, this has to be written in the global history of the pandemic,” he says.

Moisés Rockembach, who is a professor of information science at the University of Coimbra and was part of the committee that developed the standards, says that preserving digital records is fundamental, but that it is also necessary to be careful with respect to the rules regarding personal data.

“If I don’t have the digital records preserved from today, it will be very difficult in the future for me to be able to write the history of that time”, he says.

When publicizing a project in partnership with other institutions in which it sought to gather and document reports about what the pandemic experience was like for the state’s population, the Rio Grande do Sul Public Archive used a phrase that illustrates the challenge: “You live the history in real time, collaborate to record it”.