Watch Your Tweets

It may take a split second to post a 140-character tweet, but those words could last forever. Decades from now, historians may be reading your tweets to understand political campaigning, citizen journalism or public health efforts. The Library of Congress has archived about 170 billion public tweets dating back to 2006. Now the library says it's working on making that archive easy to access and use. It can take researchers 24 hours to do a single search, so the library isn't opening up the archive yet.