It’s sickening enough that they use Twitter without so much as a free-world mirror. Even more in our faces when the DG MOVE (the commission’s transport branch) repeatedly references Twitter in their biennial report (linked). Note as well that the report itself is exclusively reachable only to clearnet users. Everyone else must rely on archive.org for a copy.
Sample paragraph:
“All of these key developments were accompanied by external communication activities, in particular via DG MOVE’s X account, newsletter and website, with the aim to reach relevant stakeholders and multipliers. Under objective 3, these activities focused in particular on the revised TEN-T regulation, which reached a very high number of stakeholders and citizens on social media (274900 impressions on DG MOVE’s social media alone), the Passenger Mobility Package and its new online communication campaign for 2023-2024, to raise awareness of about EU passenger rights.”
In other words, if you want to be kept informed about your EU passenger rights, then lick Elon’s boots. We need to get to a point where licking Elon’s boots is an embarrassment. They are proudly counting the numbers of people they reach. We need to get them to count people who are excluded (as Mastodon excludes no one).
The EU has an unmonitored non-interactive Mastodon account, but that only mirrors general EU content, not DG NOVE specifically.
Also w.r.t. transparency, there is this:
“Digital Culture, and in particular Collaboration and communication was further improved by the migration to SharePoint online.”
Sharepoint is Microsoft garbage that is not open to public access.
Regarding the question of legality-- the EU has open data laws, which IIUC entails making publications accessible to everyone. I suppose I need to get to the bottom of that but my suspicion is that publishing something exclusively on Twitter and thus blocking all who don’t lick Elon’s boots is illegal. Otherwise, it certainly should be illegal.
Thanks for the insight. Apparently Mozilla is okay with this.
I suspect it violates open data law to impose JS execution as a precondition to reaching public documents.