EP Newshub goes online: The ACTA test case
Published on by Ronny Patz
At the recent Personal Democracy Forum Brussels we already got a sneak preview by Stephen Clark to the new EP Newshub. Now it’s officially out there.
As far as I understand the thing, it is supposed to bring together everything said from the inside of the European Parliament – by MEPs, political groups as well as the official EP services – on major social media platforms over the last five days.
At a first glance, it looks very intuitive and easy to use, including the choice of (multiple) languages. And I don’t know when I have used the word “intuitive” in the context of websites from EU institutions for the last time…!
What should be added in my view are the voices of MEPs’ assistants, whose commentary and substantive background tweets are sometimes better and more revealing than what their respective bosses are putting out. I suppose it’s problematic to do this for political and administrative reasons, but given the relevance assistants have in the daily work of MEPs, leaving their voices out misses and important part of the EP’s (social media) reality.
This afternoon, when ACTA will be discussed in the plenary, we might be able to see the added value of the platform for the first time. By following the ACTA topic on the EP Newshub, we could be witnessing a virtual debate parallel to the real debate, and I wonder whether this augmented political reality will help to understand what’s happening. First tweets and Facebook messages on ACTA are already coming in now, but I suspect that at 3 pm there will be some more heat.
Altogether, a very useful initiative by the EP communication services, making the multitude of voices visible even for those who are not on Facebook, Twitter et al. or who don’t have the time to assemble a long list of EP voices on their own.
When I read the headline of this post I actually expected something else: when ACTA would come into force, wouldn’t it render such aggregation platforms like EPnewshub illegal? I mean, isn’t that exactly the massive scale copyright infringement that ACTA talks about?
I know you mean that as a polemic, but I’d say that given it’s an institutional website that makes available messages from institutional actors, the copyright issue is probably the least relevant matter here.
PS.: I think EPnewshub failed during the debate yesterday, as it was not updated in real-time and several MEPs were not updated at all. But these appear to be beta version problems, as far as @tayebot told on Twitter.
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