The twitter accounts are presumably run by people who are employed by agencies funded by the US government. They could lose their jobs or have funding problems because of this.

I think a more fair comparison would be to when scientists were gagged in Canada, under the Prime Minister Harper era.

One of many sad examples: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harperman-tony-turner-scient... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei50lM6ab1c

Of course, it's not muzzling, it's "ethics violations".

> presumably

And that's the problem with this whole article.

I don't see why. It's good advice no matter what, for current or future employees. Not to mention the author's background..

It's meant to instruct hypothetical government employees working for agencies that were silenced, and wish to continue their public outreach, educating the public on issues that the current administration might disagree with.

It has an audience bigger than that (who will not likely need to go to such lengths to publicly voice dissent), but it's fairly clear about its intent.

Ah, okay. Too bad there's not some simple way to also prove it is associated with a muzzled govt employee. These accounts could be somewhat muzzled themselves by creating lots of fake dissenters tweeting inaccurate info.

It's actually quite hard to write meaningful tweets that could fool someone with a bit of knowledge of the organisation, such as a journalist who has had it in his portfolio for a while.

Plus, a journalist would have the contacts to verify the information. Traditionally, the government doesn't lie to American journalists – they may decline to comment, or give you a convoluted answer that doesn't actually answer your question. But they wouldn't lie. Considering these organisations are supposedly full of people sharing the leaker's point of view, it shouldn't be difficult to get confirmation at least off-the-record.

Of course all that requires a certain amount of trust in the media.