UPDATE: According to TechDirt, all of these regs already exist and that this letter is to loosen them. Read their post: “Politician Using Twitter To Ignite Misleading Partisan Fight Over Politicians Posting To Twitter.”
In my opinion, even with the letter, the regulations still seems unnecessary.
UPDATE 2: Tim O’Reilly has a good blog post on this too.
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Now this down right pisses me off.
US House of Representatives Democratic leadership is recommending to the Committee on House Administration that they adopt unnecessary regulations about the use of social media by House members.
The concern is with House members posting content outside of the domain “house.gov”… like Twitter or YouTube.
One suggestion was that the committee put together a list of “approved” sites that meet House regulations. Another was that any link to a external domain must have one of those damn annoying “Your Now Leaving the House of Representatives” pages, which just KILL the experience.
Rep. John Culberson has been a leader in social media within Congress. He’s a frequent Twitterer and will post frequent videos on Qik of his activity. He’s using social media to engage the members of his district as well as the country, if not the world.
The thought that Twitter or Qik would have to go before some type of committee review before people could use it frightens me. Having worked at a government agency, I know how long this kind of thing would take.
This is supposed to be a government of “of the people.” The people are on Twitter, Qik, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. Congressional leadership should be encouraging members to use these sites and not discouraging it.
What does Congress have to hide that they want to block this stuff?
I ask you that write a blog post, a tweet, or record a video saying how much you appreciate that Rep. John Culberson is acting as a leader in social media within Congress and that you’d like more to follow his lead.
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