On August 25, 2009, I wrote here about the SEC’s new “SEC_Actions” Twitter feed. I noted that unlike the already existing @SEC_News feed, which was somewhat half-heartedly and sporadically announcing SEC enforcement actions along with other miscellaneous SEC announcements, the SEC_Actions feed was dedicated to announcing new SEC cases in a timely fashion.

SEC_Actions served as a useful source of information for five weeks. After a last tweet on September 30, 2009, however, SEC_Actions went radio-silent. Although the feed remains publicly available, we are now going on six weeks since it has been updated.

Why? Having a feed of SEC enforcement actions on Twitter is a no-brainer, and can almost certainly be wired to update automatically when the SEC updates its Litigation Releases page.  So why, then, did SEC_Actions go silent?

I reached out to an SEC spokesperson about this yesterday (who I will not identify because I don’t think this person really thought this through). But the response I received was that the SEC was “focusing on our investor education, news, and jobs Twitter feeds for now.”

I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but to me, that is kind of like saying you’re not using your left turn signal while driving because you are “focusing” on the right turn signal, the gas pedal and the brake. That is to say, with about .0000001 percent additional effort, you could keep posting the SEC enforcement actions to @SEC_Actions and “maintain focus” on the other feeds.  Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.