The National Parks Service has been banned from using Twitter

Depending on how you feel about mostly-corny jokes, official/verified accounts posting memes and other #cool things could be either totally unprofessional or of the times. Alas, it turns out that retweeting unflattering (though #tru) things about our new administration lands in the former camp.

The National Parks Service has reportedly been told not to use Twitter for missives after a rogue NPS employee retweeted a couple of anti-Trump tweets on the official account.

According to a Gizmodo source, those retweets were an accident. This is literally every social media manager’s worst nightmare: Something you thought you flippantly shared on your personal account accidentally went onto your work account. (That’s what all those “These tweets do not reflect the views of my employer” disclaimers are for, yo.)

Yet the order to stop using all National Park Service Twitters does seem a bit like overkill, no? Because it’s not just the National Park Service account that’s eating the change; it’s all NPS-affiliated accounts. Now, their usual Twitter fare of, say, weather conditions are moving to other social networks for the time being.

Of course, all federal agencies’ social medias are under scrutiny during this time of transition. Before yesterday, maybe you could count election/government/related memes as bad taste at worst. And accidents do happen — but those specific retweets happen to activate this administration’s most sensitive trigger, of many.

Now the National Parks Service’s future is, like many federal agencies, unclear. It’s not a surprise that wherever the order to stop using Twitter originated, it’s in their best interests to lay off the Twitter fingers, accident or no. What’s more important is what happens when they finally return.