Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) is the first Millennial elected to the House of Representatives, so it's only natural that questionable behavior involving him should be pegged to some of his selfies.
The Associated Press dug into Schock's Instagram feed (think: Rich Kids of Capitol Hill) and compared some of the destinations he tagged in his photos during 2011 and 2012 to financial filings from his campaign and office involving travel. In doing so, it found more than $40,000 in flights on planes owned by donors.
Those photos, though, are no longer online. Schock appears to have cleaned up a bit, with his oldest photo now being one from August 2013. Don't worry; there are still plenty of photos from exotic locales and photos of Schock himself (as below) to enjoy.
If the account has been pared down, it raises the question: Who's capturing this stuff? With one exception, the answer is "no one."
At 10 o'clock in the morning on June 28, 2012, the day the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Obamacare, Schock tweeted "Individual Mandate ruled unconstitutional...still developing...." That was incorrect, perhaps the result of conflicting news reports in the wake of the decision. So within a minute, Schock deleted the tweet.
We know that because the Sunlight Foundation's follows elected officials on Twitter and scoops up all of their tweets. When it sees that a tweet has been deleted, it posts it online, as it did with Schock's.
This is hardly scandalous; let he without an erroneous tweet cast the first egg avatar. Schock has deleted a number of other tweets, too, including spam links and links to Instagram. Nor has Politwoops been central to unmasking rampant corruption, though it has certainly caused a few headaches.
The service is nonetheless important. Capturing the activity of elected officials on social media means having an index that can reveal improper spending (as spotted by the AP), inconsistency or departures from past statements, and the occasional Anthony Weiner. But Politwoops only scrapes Twitter.
There are downsides to communicating in the digital age. Having a massive amount of information at their disposal allows people to cherry-pick critiques, as Lawrence Lessig noted in 2009. Digital communications don't age, meaning that a statement from 2007 is indistinguishable from one coming from the person of 2015. Those concerns are secondary, though, to having a full record of the behavior and statements of someone in a position of public power. And as social media grows more mature, we already see automated tools for wiping your history.
You rarely know what bit of information will be important until it becomes important. Schock uses Instagram in the same way he uses Taylor Swift quotes: as a cultural reinforcement of his public identity. It wasn't until someone looked at that activity from an outside perspective that the importance of the photos was made clear. If someone tried to do that this morning, they wouldn't be able to.
More and more elected officials arriving in Washington will share or learn Schock's familiarity with social media tools (and/or learn from him the virtue of moderation). That's more and more opportunities for allegedly improper behavior to be revealed.
If we still have a record of it.
Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He is based in New York City.
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