Here is the news article, written in the requested style and format.

---

State Department To Erase Public Social Media History Pre-Dating Trump's Return

The U.S. State Department is undertaking a sweeping digital purge, confirming it will delete all public posts from its official accounts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, published before President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025.

The move represents a significant departure from previous government transitions, where the digital footprints of past administrations were typically archived and left publicly accessible. This action will remove years of diplomatic communication, policy announcements, and public engagement from immediate view, fundamentally altering the public record of U.S. foreign policy.

Why it matters

This directive is more than a digital cleanup. It's a strategic maneuver to control the administration's messaging by creating a clean slate, free from the context or potential contradictions of past U.S. foreign policy statements.

For international partners, investors, and researchers who rely on this public data to track policy evolution and assess geopolitical risk, the move introduces a new layer of opacity. The erasure of the day-to-day diplomatic record makes it harder to verify commitments, understand historical context, and anticipate future policy shifts.

The Details of the Directive

The State Department's plan is comprehensive, affecting the core of its public-facing digital diplomacy infrastructure.

• The Directive: All posts on active, official State Department X accounts made before January 20, 2025, are to be removed from public view. This includes posts from the first Trump administration and the entirety of the Biden and Obama administrations.

• Official Rationale: A State Department spokesperson told NPR the goal is "to limit confusion on U.S government policy and to speak with one voice." The spokesperson emphasized that the department's X accounts "are one of our most powerful tools for advancing the America First goals and messaging of the President."

• Scope of Impact: The order applies across the board to the department's vast network of accounts, including those for U.S. embassies and missions worldwide, individual ambassadors, and the various bureaus and programs operating under the State Department's purview.

A Pattern of Information Control

This action at the State Department is not an isolated incident but part of a broader, administration-wide effort to reshape the government's public-facing information.

• Wider Removals: Since taking office, the Trump administration has removed significant amounts of information from government websites, particularly data related to the environment and public health, as well as references to diversity and inclusion initiatives concerning women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.

• Revision of History: The White House has actively promoted a revisionist account of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It also replaced the government's primary coronavirus resource websites with a page focused on the "Lab Leak" theory of the virus's origins.

• Cultural and Historical Sites: Tangible historical records have also been altered, with signs at national parks mentioning slavery being taken down and references to former President Trump's impeachments removed from the National Portrait Gallery.

• Unrelated but Similar Actions: In a separate move this week, the CIA abruptly announced it was "sunsetting" its World Factbook. The widely used public resource, available online since 1997, was a global standard for baseline country data. The agency offered no detailed explanation for its termination.

Archived, Not Erased: The FOIA Hurdle

While the State Department asserts the content will be preserved, accessing it will become profoundly more difficult for the public, journalists, and researchers.

• The Process: The posts will be internally archived in accordance with the Federal Records Act. However, an internal source confirmed that any member of the public wishing to see these older posts must now file a formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

• The Barrier: The FOIA process is notoriously slow, often taking months or years to yield results. Requests can also be costly, and the resulting documents are frequently subject to heavy redaction or outright denial, transforming what was once instantly accessible public information into a bureaucratic challenge.

Voices of Concern

Current and former diplomats, alongside academic experts, have raised alarms about the long-term consequences of walling off this digital history.

• Loss of Transparency: "For all the many challenges... social media has introduced into politics, it has also created this level of an imperfect but certainly some level of transparency," noted Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Even if [the posts are] still accessible in some kind of archive, it still puts up a greater barrier in terms of having access to that information."

• Erasing the Diplomatic Record: Orna Blum, a retired senior foreign service officer, highlighted the richness of the data being lost. "These posts... include our embassies' July 4 livestreams, photos of COVID vaccine donations to other nations, holiday greetings, condolences, cultural programming, and the day-to-day record of diplomacy," she wrote. "They show who the U.S. engaged with, when, and how—often the only public record of those moments."

The Bottom Line

The State Department's decision to scrub its public digital history is a calculated move to centralize narrative control and enforce the "America First" doctrine without the inconvenient context of past diplomatic practice. While framed as a measure to "limit confusion," it effectively creates an information vacuum that only the current administration's voice can fill.

This introduces significant uncertainty for global markets and foreign governments, which thrive on predictability and a clear understanding of U.S. policy trajectory. By making the historical record difficult to access, the administration complicates the ability of outside observers to analyze its actions based on precedent. The immediate question is whether other federal agencies will be directed to follow suit, further restricting public access to the government's own history.