Social media is a powerful and useful tool for facilitating\u00a0communication between federal agencies and their constituents.\u00a0However, the recent ruling by the Government Accountability\u00a0Office (\u201cGAO\u201d) that a social media campaign undertaken by the\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency (\u201cEPA\u201d) violated both the\u00a0Federal Antideficiency Act (\u201cFADA\u201d) and the prohibition on\u00a0grass-roots lobbying has raised questions regarding how agencies\u00a0can continue to utilize social media going forward without\u00a0committing similar infractions. The EPA\u2019s campaign, which it\u00a0undertook to promote its controversial Waters of the United States\u00a0rule, was primarily conducted via the social media platforms\u00a0Twitter and Thunderclap. These platforms provide a particularly\u00a0effective means through which agencies can interact with members\u00a0of the public. A clearer standard regarding what constitutes good\u00a0practice versus what behaviors are disallowed needs to be\u00a0determined in the interest of encouraging this valuable means of\u00a0civil engagement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Social media is a powerful and useful tool for facilitating\u00a0communication between federal agencies and their constituents.\u00a0However, the recent ruling by the Government Accountability\u00a0Office (\u201cGAO\u201d) that a social media campaign undertaken by the\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency (\u201cEPA\u201d) violated both the\u00a0Federal Antideficiency Act (\u201cFADA\u201d) and the prohibition on\u00a0grass-roots lobbying has raised questions regarding how agencies\u00a0can continue to utilize …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,68,71],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7202,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081\/revisions\/7202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}