Thursday, October 01, 2009

European Parliament orders closure of Facebook Group

EuroparlTV is an expensive bastard son of the French and Dutch 'No' votes on the European Constitution. It is a vastly expensive multilingual format webtv experiment ctreated as part of the reach out to citizens envisioned in the infamous 'Plan D'.

According to its Charter,
The European Parliament has established a web television channel (called "europarltv") to respond to the right of all citizens to know and understand what is happening in the institution that they have elected. The channel is designed to contribute to the democratisation of the European Union and to the
development of a European public space.
Oh goody, that European public space. A wonderful pressure valve for the masses where they can think European thoughts, sire European children and generally behave in a communitaire fashion.

Point 4 of the Charter bears repeating,
The channel shall be developed in such a way as to reinforce interactivity between the Parliament and European citizens. It shall enable citizens to express their views on the contents of the channel and to contribute to that content.
Which is interesting. Here you would expect that the TV station would be employing all those aspects of modern communications such as Twitter, and facebook ad so on.

So imagine my surprise when I looked at my Facebook messages today and saw this message from one Andreas Dietl, who describes himself as "in charge of editing the content for EuroParl TV, the European Parliament's web-based TV channel."
EuroparlTV Facebook group closed

To members of europarltv

Andreas Dietl 28 September at 16:33 Reply • Report
Dear friends,

at the request of European Parliament officials we have to close this group.

Thank you for your interest!
Oh dear, I wonder what happened? I wonder if they were not actually particulaly happy that some of the Group members didn't like the sound of his masters voice.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

or maybe the groupm was actually so small they found it embarrasing ;)

Nick

Gawain Towler said...

I don't know, I never looked. Though sources tell me it was lack of control. When I know more I may reprise this one

Ralf Grahn said...

Gawain,

Perhaps you and some others could encourage your friends to produce web sites for the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) groups in the European Parliament.

ENGLISHMAN said...

So just when did we "elect"the eussr government?

Ralf Grahn said...

Englishman,

It is difficult to know what your question referred to exactly, but the European Union - which is neither soviet nor socialist - has no government directly comparable to the ones in the nation states.

The most influential (governing body) is the duo European Council and Council, where the democratically representative governments of the EU member states sit.

We have the directly elected European Parliament, which legislates on an equal footing with the Council in many areas, but not all. (There would be more under the Lisbon Treaty.)

Then there is the Commission, which proposes legislation and has decision-making powers in certain core areas, like competition and external trade, but in many respects is akin to a civil service. The leading figures, the Commissioners, are essentially proposed by the governments of the member states, but they have to be approved by the European Parliament.

Although the European Union is still based on its member states, it has more democratic elements than other international organisations.

So the short answer is: it has not happened yet.

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