An email sent to park staff earlier this month noted that the change was to “improve the efficiency of messaging and to streamline the flow of information.”

Of course, one person’s “streamlining” is another person’s “curtailing.”

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Some Marylanders are worried their particular parks will get lost in the shuffle. If you’re accustomed to following the news out of Assateague State Park, what do you care about Gunpowder Falls?

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“You follow what’s relevant to you and what matters to you,” said Jeanette Gerrity Gómez, a self-described “avid parkgoer” from Parkville, outside Baltimore.

How to handle Twitter is something a lot of organizations struggle with: What’s the best way to use social media to spread information? How much autonomy do you allow individual employees when it comes to tweeting, retweeting or liking?

With the Maryland parks, it’s not individual employee accounts that are at issue. It’s the individual park accounts maintained by rangers. They produce tweets like this one, from New Germany State Park in Garrett County: “X-country ski conditions: There is approximately 2” of snow on the trails with a glaze of ice on top. The conditions are not favorable, so we will not be renting skis today.”

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That’s the sort of granular information Twitter can provide.

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DNR spokesman Gregg Bortz said the same content will be disseminated after the individual accounts go silent Jan. 31. Draft tweets will just first need to go to one of several regional social media contacts, he said, before they are posted under the @MDStateParks imprimatur.

But won’t that make it hard to find what’s happening at any one park?

“One of the things that park staff is working on right now is a standardized approach to using hashtags, for people to be able to find the parks they’re interested in specifically,” Bortz said. “The goal here is for people who are interested in our parks to get more information and our information to get out to more people. We believe this will help grow customer engagement with the parks.”

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Not everyone is convinced. Kate Clifford Larson, a consulting historian for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center, said: “I can’t imagine how this is going to be good for individual parks. I don’t see how people at a state-level office could communicate the interaction and the information that Twitter communicates on a daily basis to people who follow the park.”

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But nor is everyone concerned. Jay Gordon of Ellicott City hikes with the Mountain Club of Maryland. Many of the club’s members are in their 50s and 60s, he said, and don’t use Twitter in the first place.

The Department of Natural Resource’s new social media policy affects Facebook, too. Ten DNR Facebook groups have been collapsed into six, Bortz said.

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That process has stung the Western Garrett County State Park Volunteers, a friends group that provides support and funding for activities at Deep Creek Lake and Sang Run state parks.

The group launched a Facebook page 11 years ago. Earlier this month, DNR subsumed it under the general Maryland parks Facebook page. All the unique content collected over the past decade — the photos, the posts, the messages — vanished. It can’t be resurrected, said Duane Bailey, a club member from Oakland, Md.

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“We’re heartbroken,” he said.

The club has created a new page while continuing to partner with DNR.

“We still want to volunteer at the park,” Bailey said.

I spoke with one Maryland park ranger who said: “I don’t understand why they’re taking it from us. None of us were posting things that would have been detrimental to their mission.” (The ranger spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to get in trouble with the bosses.)

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None of the parks have Kardashian-level followings. Most have from 2,000 to 6,000 followers; @MDStateParks has 17,300.

But small accounts can have an intimate feel — and an immediacy — that many find endearing. Some rangers have been known to pull out their smartphones when they see a particularly nice sunset and post a photo to Twitter.

“If you’re lucky, someone will come and watch it with you,” the ranger said. “If you have to go through those middlemen to get it posted, it’s not going to have that same impact five days later when they finally get around to posting it.”