The Obama White House joined Tumblr on this day, one decade ago.

In 2023, the White House is not on Tumblr or many of the other social networks it was updating in 2013.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, GitHub, & Flickr endure.

Digg, MySpace, Vine, Storify, GooglePlus, not so much.

It’s surprising that they’re not on LinkedIn.

Once a White House commits to reaching Americans “where we are”, then the offices of public engagement, press secretary, & communications need to apply online & offline strategies for public participation & public information, not just for politics.

Relevant vectors include:
📰 news
📻 radio
📺 TV
💬 texts
🤳social media
📧 email
🎙️town halls
📚libraries
🚉transit
🏫schools

Instead of banning TikTok, imagine if the White House tried to engage ~150 million Americans there, & then crossposted each video PSA across Instagram Snap Inc. & YouTube to ensure that info was available to all.

Start with vote.gov & serve.gov or. Build new .gov & services with us.

I know it looks dark online, but we should still be thinking bigger about how to do more than just get We the People Internet access, as foundational as that is: we need to make it matter, rebuilding trust through the delivery of trustworthy information over time on participatory platforms.

Better digital services won’t be enough: we need integrated offline and online strategies that find publics with information wherever we are.

We need a government communications revolution proportionate to the paired public health and civic crises we have collectively endured over the pandemic.

I still believe in the capacity of my fellow Americans to deliver on it, in no small part by learning about what the rest of the world is doing online and adapting, adopting, and improving civic technologies that meet our own needs.