Twitter: the most useless political medium in history?

You probably know Twitter, the web site where every citizen can tell about his activities. The question ‘what are you doing?’ should be answered in 140 signs. Thousands of citizens already discovered the web site, where they follow their friends, colleages or family members, and where they tell their followers about their activities.

The Dutch minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, started using Twitter several months ago. At the moment he has more than 20.000 followers who inform themselves about Verhagen’s meetings, travels and opinions. Since then, other politicians discovered Twitter too. They provide citizens with information that was not available in the past: Member of the European Parliament Sophie in ‘t Veld has a debate on friday morning with a well-known lawyer about privacy, a liberal city councillor in The Hague is travelling to a campaign meeting and the political leader of the Green party alerts us that her party member wrote a piece in one of the main newspapers.

You’d better know all these things. It is quite clear that all this information does not serve any purpose: nobody asks for these messages and nobody reads them. Member of Parliament Boris van der Ham twittered once about financial issues. I twittered back that I think that he is unable to make his own calculations. Immediately, a party member replied that I should have included ‘@borisham’ in my tweet, because otherwise Boris would be unable to read it. I twittered that I thought it was uninteresting whether Boris read that tweet, and asked her whether she thought that she had real readers and whether Boris had some. No answer.

Twitter enables these kind of interactions. Politicians who have hundreds of followers can send messages to them for hours if they want to. I asked some local politicians why they actually use this medium. ‘To inform citizens about my work’ was the standard answer. But isn’t this the role of journalists, who also attract a much larger audience than Twitter? It seems some politicians already understand that journalists matter are more important: one of the most popular Dutch politicians, Alexander Pechtold, started on Twitter but stopped after a few tweets. His popularity did not suffer from it.

The chair of the Dutch parliament Gerdi Verbeet wants members of parliament to stop twittering during debates, which makes these members complain in public. I twittered to Member of Parliament Jack Biskop that the quality of many Dutch laws is poor, so that it would be best when Members of Parliament give attention to the debate. No answer. Member of the European Parliament Wim van de Camp wants seperate meetings for Dutch members of the EP. I twittered the question why this is useful, because party differences are more important than national interests. No answer. A politician from Amsterdam talked on Dutch television about gay rights. I twittered him to ask what his financial proposals in this area are. No answer.

This is the lesson of Twitter: it makes politicians look very modern, transparent and interactive. But when problems occur in their work, politicians stop twittering immediately. Information is only provided when it cannot be considered dangerous. Politicians only answer questions that are not critical and when their answers do not reveal any new information. The most useless political medium in history has a name: Twitter.

Chris Aalberts*
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 

* Chris Aalberts is lecturer and researcher in political communication. Visit his blog: http://www.chrisaalberts.nl/ - This paper is also accessible in Dutch