Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department — Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) — has set up a trial Twitter account, joining what it described as the “tweeps”.
At present the Twitter account has tweeted five times, had 175 followers and was following 70. The first tweet was at 10:30am this morning. “Hello Tweeps, we’re trialling a new approach with Twitter. Strictly beta. Read more: http://bit.ly/chpzTP. Feedback welcome. #gov2au”.
The latest tweet was about the department’s involvement in a national business summit panel, “The Dept is participating in a National Business Summit panel “Truly Tech Savvy” http://bit.ly/a3FwoV today. Should be interesting. #nsbs”
A statement on DBCDE’s website about the twitter account stated that if Twitterers sent @DBCDEgov a direct message or replied to it, the team would respond “as quickly as we can”, but as a general rule, it would only monitor the account during business hours.
The DBCDE policy is that people who follow the new account will be followed back. The department assured Twitters that if they wanted to follow the account but didn’t won’t to be followed back “please feel free to block us”. The department is open to feedback about the Twitter account and has set up an email address, twitter@dbcde.gov.au, for that purpose. However, an email to that address enquiring who was personally monitoring the account was not immediately responded to.
However the department may not have received the welcome to Twitter that it was hoping for, with dozens of Twitter uses immediately @ replying to the account with messages expressing dissent towards the Federal Government’s controversial mandatory internet filtering policy.
“Dump the Internet Filter, it’s bad policy, it won’t work, we don’t need it,” was one tweet that was repeated many times, while others simply stated: “NO INTERNET FILTER FOR AUSTRALIA.”
Image credit: Alberto Paroni, royalty free
Fairly pointless exercise expecting to get a useful response to any complaints. And what will the account actually achieve? Gov 2.0 is such a crock of shite. It’s all spin; in practice government is moving *away* from the principles of open government.
I really need to stop reading news about our ridiculous government; local, state or federal, it doesn’t matter. The spin doctors are in charge, and we ultimately let our politicians transfer the power to them.
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