As the Manchester Evening News reports:
Councillors in Salford will be banned from using Twitter in meetings.
Gatherings of the full council at Salford’s town hall have been covered live by councillors via their micro-blogging profiles.
The debates have attracted hundreds of followers, but town hall bosses have now banned members from using the site during meetings.
I have to admit to being rather confused by this opposition to Twitter that’s creeping across a few Town Halls.
The argument is that councillors who are twittering can’t be paying attention, but how can you report on a meeting if you’re not paying attention to it?
At Stockport Full Council (where I’m a twittering councillor) I, like most other backbench councillors, will speak once or twice at most, in a three or four hour meeting.
During the course of the meeting, it’s perfectly OK (or, at least, tolerated) for members to leave the chamber for a comfort break, a fag break or a chat, or indeed to catch up on some reading.
In the last couple of Full Council meetings, there have been two people reporting via Twitter – myself and a reporter from the local paper. (You can read my reports here and here).
Given how few members of the public attend Full Council meetings (on a busy day in Stockport it might be as many as 50 out of our 250,000+ population), anything that promotes proceedings and gets a few more people interested in local democracy is a positive thing.
That’s not to say tweeting is always appropriate. I don’t tweet from any meeting where I’m taking an active role, like Local Area Committees and Scrutiny Committees. I can pay attention and tweet, but I can’t participate and tweet.
Tweeting as a form of reporting is in its infancy – we’re all doing it pretty poorly at the moment and we haven’t quite figured out how to best report sometimes complex proceedings in 140 character tweets, or how to bring divers tweets together to produce a sensible narrative of a meeting.
But it’s a positive development. It’s not going to transform local democracy if, in addition to fifty people hearing proceedings from the public gallery, a few hundred follow the meeting on Twitter, but surely it’s a step in the right direction.
So far, the powers that be in Stockport have been supportive (if mildly amused) of my twittering; and I’m trying to make sure it’s appropriate and doesn’t detract from any contributions I might make to the meetings. I can only hope that continues.
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7 Comments
“Councillors in Salford will be banned from using Twitter” by whom? Presumably, the only body able to ban tweeting in the chamber is the Council, which would have to amend the constitution to do so. In that sense, it is a perfectly democratic thing to do.
OTOH, Council is a democratic rather than a voluntary body so it ought to limit its rules to what is necessary to ensure the smooth running of its business (no shouting or swearing, for example). I can’t see how tweeting undermines the Council’s operations, while the loss of attention by a councillor is clearly moe than made up for by the additional sharing of information with a wider public.
As for whether tweeting is a good thing in itself, it seems to be harmless and potentially useful. So the ban seems silly to me. Are they Conservatives?
>> Councillors in Salford will be banned from using Twitter in meetings.
I think this is perfectly reasonable, just as I would be a little bit bemused at anyone objecting to being banned from using their mobiles in meetings.
It’s not quite the same thing. Using a mobile tends to involve making a noise and that certainly does detract from the goings on. Using Twitter (as long as you use the right app) is silent. It is also not private business but communicating the business of a public meeting to the wider public.
I vaguely remember from a tour of the Welsh Assembly that AMs are online at their desks and were positively encouraged to communicate with constituents during the session.
As for 50 people at full council, how lucky you are. When I worked for the local party in Reading I regularly attended council meetings and there were never more than 7 or 8 people in the gallery – all party workers or candidates!
You are dead right Alec these people should grow up, and leave the kids to twitter !!!
Next you will have MPs at it !!!!!
>> It’s not quite the same thing.
No, it really is the same thing. It’s distracting from their attention to the proceedings (unlike opening the venue to the public, who act as spectators).
And, I have similar misgivings about M(S)Ps doing so, especially as the 140 character limit can lend to idiotically brief/banal comments.
The value of what you can communicate and who you can communicate it to is skewed entirely in the direction of epic failure. Twitter has the perfect combination of being able to post in haste and repent at leisure. Twitter users are more likely to get themselves and whatever organisations (party, council, department) they represent in deep doo-doo for making a twit of themselves than they are to achieve any useful communication to any significant audience.
If it was banned in Salford then there should be some kind of a record as to why… My guess would be that someone was tweeting when they should have been participating (or listening).
Maybe I’m just too polite (it’s unlikely but possible) but it’s just rude to be fiddling with your phone while someone else is talking in a meeting.
Some time ago, Salford’s Mayor introduced a “fine” on mobile phone ringing during council session. Quite right too, and the Mayor’s charity benefits every time a mobile phone rings during council. However, in his wisdom (and after virtually forcing the opposition leaders to agree) tweeting during the session is banned by councillors. Unfortunately, as the Mayor doesn’t tweet himself – he fails to understand that councillors are trying to engage with their voters, supporters, residents etc. The Mayor has just cut off a vital line of communication to the city’s taxpayers.
Of course, tweeting by councillors would be completely unnecessary if Salford Council did the decent thing and allowed audio or video recordings of council meetings – or at least moved it to a more family-friendly timeslot (perhaps 7pm, same as Bury Council). But no.
I wrote to Salford Council’s (now retiring) city solicitor and put these points to him some months ago and the answer was quite ridiculous.
Here is a small excerpt, courtesy of Anthony Rich, Salford Council’s city solicitor:
“The occasion attracts “qualified privilege” (to use the technical term) in defamation law. That privilege would not apply to a rebroadcast and so a member might be at risk of defamation proceedings if the subject of his remarks were to identify a republication outside the council chamber, such as by replay of a recording.
Secondly I suspect that the Council is mindful of the risks of malicious editing of the proceedings. Whilst no doubt you would regard such activity as wholly unethical others might be prepared to do it and the simplest solution is to prevent tape recordings.”
If this were true, why would it not apply to TV recordings of MPs in the Houses of Parliament?
Quite ridiculous.