Italians have been scratching graffiti on walls since at least the days of ancient Pompeii, but this week they did their part to move the concept into the 21st century during a European Union summit in Brussels.
As EUobserver.com reported, the summit organizers, having apparently not paused to ask themselves the question, “what could possibly go wrong?” informed Twitter users on Thursday that their comments on the meeting would be streamed live and unmoderated onto a TweetWall in the building where European leaders were gathering.
The experiment in participatory punditry was quickly abandoned after critics of one of those leaders, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, seized the opportunity to fill screens at the summit with comments like: “Berlusconi pays for sex, for votes, for mafia protection, for everything he can buy. What he cannot buy, will be stolen.”
One Italian who took part in the virtual heckling, Martino Pietropoli, claimed to be “just retweeting Berlusconi,” by adding a string of embarrassing quotes from Mr. Berlusconi’s rich archive of gaffes, including one of his most famous: “Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.”
Mr. Pietropoli also played a role in exhorting other Italians to get cover the wall with anti-Berlusconi slogans — by adding the hashtag #euco to their critical comments — for which, he suggested they could be rewarded in “paradiso” by 72 virgins.
A spokeswoman for the organizers, Dana Manescu, told EUobserver, “We had the TweetWall up for two hours in the main hall, but it wasn’t moderated and a lot of the tweets were, well, very, very frank.” Ms. Manescu said the plug was pulled on the experiment because of fears that, “if anyone from the Italian delegation saw it, it would hurt their sensibility.”
Robin Wauters of TechCrunch observed, “For what it’s worth, Tweetwall Pro says they have tools for live and automatic moderation in place, but says the press team didn’t feel they would need to moderate the conversation.”