Today Sophie in’t Veld, a member of the European Parliament from the Dutch social-liberal party D66, reduced her mountain of emails from the height of Kilimanjaro to that of Mount Ventoux in France. She now thinks she deserves the Tour de France jersey for her efforts.
But replying to emails is not all she’s been doing today, and if you want to know more you can follow her online. Out of all the members of the European Parliament, she has the most followers on social media platform Twitter, and posts the most Tweets.
She’s not the only MEP to jump on the social media bandwagon. You can now get up close and personal with several members of the European Parliament, thanks to a new website that’s bringing all their tweets together for the benefit of citizens who like democracy in real-time.
Europatweets is the brainchild of Xavier Damman, a 25-year-old web entrepreneur from Brussels who put the website together a year and a half ago, in preparation for the European elections held in June.
“We published the tweets coming from the Belgium politicians. We started with seven people on Twitter, and in a number of weeks there were 70 on Twitter, sharing their votes and ideas for the next election.”
Europatweets is inspired by a similar website in the United States, Tweet Congress. The American website opens with a declaration by the “Tweeple of the United States”, a cheeky play-on-words on the famous phrase in the U.S. Constitution, promoting transparency in the congress through the micro-blogging platform.
Damman has similar faith in what Europatweets can do for Europe. “Here it’s so easy to tweet, that any MEP, even during a session, they can just tweet their idea or just ask for feedback. Even the busiest MEP can just take his phone and start sharing and be more transparent about what he’s doing,” he says.
Twitter also has the added benefit of nudging politicians to get to the point much faster, Damman says. “It forces them to explain their ideas in 140 characters, which is not easy for politicians who are used to speaking for hours on TV.”
“And they can have direct feedback from anybody,” he adds. “The feedback they get is also limited by 140 characters. They have the potential to get a better view of what the reactions are.”
But he concedes that the idea of participatory democracy through Twitter- a Twitocracy, if you will, is not perfect.
“Some MEP are joining Twitter but they don’t really know how to use it, some delegate that to their PR agency,” Damman says. “People may start with publishing links to their press release, but then realize, ‘Oh, my colleague is also on Twitter and he has more followers than me. How come?’, and then, the person will start to understand: ‘Oh, but maybe I should post other things?’”
“But then you get people who really start playing with it, and get interactions from their followers, and that’s where it gets really interesting.”
Watch a video of Sophie speaking about her use of Twitter (in Dutch!)
Belinda Lopez worked in radio, print and online journalism in Australia and Indonesia before moving to Europe this year. She is Spanish, but is yet to work in the media there. It is on her to-do list. She is currently taking an Erasmus Mundus masters in international relations, globalization and economics, aimed at journalists. The course is split between Aarhus in Denmark, Amsterdam and London, and she is enjoying working as a journalist in several different European countries alongside her studies.
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