Feds continued to Tweet despite attack on the service

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the attack did not cause him to stop Tweeting. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Many federal agencies on Tuesday continued to update the public about government initiatives on the text-messaging service Twitter despite a bug that infected entries, including those sent by the White House press secretary.

The key to establishing an audience through Twitter is to publish updates on a regular basis, some federal new media specialists say. That seems to be what Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did during and after the hacking incident.

A virus caused Gibbs' Twitter account to transmit a Tweet that consisted of a nonsensical chain of letters and symbols to followers, or every person who subscribes to his updates. Soon afterward, he sent a Tweet letting his followers know he was not responsible for the note: "My Twitter went haywire -- absolutely no clue why it sent that message or even what it is . . . paging the tech guys."

An hour later, he was back on the service telling the Twittersphere: "GOP to repeal Wall Street reform, put banks back in charge & end help for consumers dealing with credit card companies." The State Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency and NASA also continued to Tweet messages throughout the day despite the publicity about the bug.

Twitter, which limits users' entries to 140 characters, is a social networking tool that allows anyone, including agency media affairs specialists and some federal executives, to broadcast real-time updates on a screen that looks like a blog. Other users can subscribe to an individual's Twitter feed and automatically receive updates -- or they can search for a particular user's home page through the service and see the same material.

Virtually every agency has at least one Twitter account to publicize news, events and activities -- generally the same kind of information it advertises on press releases, blogs and other communications channels.

Managing expectations is important for building relationships within the online community, Amanda Eamich, the Web communications director for the Agriculture Department, recently explained. It doesn't matter whether an agency posts one Tweet a day or three Tweets a week as long as a writer posts consistently, she added. Agriculture employees typically limit Tweets to about five a day.

On Tuesday, at an offline press briefing, Gibbs said he never considered taking a break from Twitter because of the attack. "From time to time, I have no doubt that there will be those that want to gum up the system and things like that. I don't hesitate to continue to use it," he told reporters. "Since the combination of letters and numbers didn't actually equal a message, I'm not worried about that code being misinterpreted. . . . If that were the case then none of us would use computers, right?"

He added if everyone were that afraid of computer glitches, then "we would all be writing on parchment, or we'd be sending letters in the mail as press releases, which we used to do not too long ago. So it's the vagaries of doing business."

The Twitter website stated later in the afternoon that the bug had been patched.