Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano is causing a sociopolitical storm on Capitol Hill that has the potential of banning the U.S. Congress from accessing specific websites without clearance.
Talk about Big Brother surveilling itself.
Capuano is chairman of the Franking Commission, also known as the Committee on Mailing Standards, a bipartisan House body formed in 1775 that determines whether constituent communications meet ethical guidelines.
Of concern today, the Franking Commission disapproves of house.gov domain links “to campaign-related Web sites, political parties, advocacy groups and ‘any site the primary purpose of which is the conduct of commerce.’”
This makes sense to me. I don’t want taxpayer money funding political advertising either.
Responding to limited storage space on the house.gov domain and a lack of available web tools, many House members create videos, post them on external sites such as YouTube and Facebook, and link to those videos directly from their house.gov page.
I have profiles on those sites, and many more, so I can appreciate the necessity to use social media sites to help spread one’s message and brand to others.
Capuano disagrees.
French newspaper, Le Monde, published a map in February 2008 showing every continent with graphs of social media usage. [Source: Mashable]
MySpace is seen with 223 million American users, and Facebook ranks in the U.S. with 173 million.
I’m sure the numbers are higher now.
Because of the congressional practice to link to outside sites that more and more people connect to each other on, Capuano wrote a letter last month to Robert Brady, chair of the Committee on House Administration, requesting any House member wishing to post content on an external domain must meet defined regulations and must embed such videos on their own pages, restricting linking to external sites.
The backlash was immediate, beginning with House Minority Leader John Boehner who released an Internet Freedom Alert Tuesday that if the HAC adopt the Franking proposal, Americans would see a restriction of “the free flow of information.”
Laughing at the Republican response, Capuano released a statement yesterday, insisting Republicans are wrong, and the proposal is to regulate video only, not social media as a whole.
The ONLY item we seek to address is LOOSENING existing rules to allow Members to post videos as a first step toward making the rules meet our constituents’ expectations regarding how they communicate with us in the 21st century. This was completely ignored during the years that Republicans controlled Congress while the internet grew exponentially. It is currently against House rules to post video on any site with commercial or political advertising or to use taxpayer-funded resources to post outside of the House.gov domain.
Political junkies and online journalists including James Joyner, Jon Henke, Jeremy Jacobs, and John Wonderlich ask whether Congress would need clearance, for instance, to post Twitter messages.
The backlash continues, further, with Tim O’Brien who praises Wonderlich for starting an online movement, Let Our Congress Tweet (since it’s apparently illegal to use Twitter from the House floor).
I’m sure there are many other links. Capuano and his staff are following the debate, as he stated yesterday:
As soon as this latest political hyperventilation is contained, I hope to get back to work so we can continue to update our rules and procedures. Anyone familiar with the rules knows they need to be updated. But anyone who follows politics knows that these endeavors are always more difficult than they seem.
I agree that laws and regulations are necessary, but there comes a point when one more law is one too many.
I know Mike Capuano. I’ve met him a few times. I used to work on Beacon Hill with his son, Joe, who I respect for his government liaison skills.
But look at this April 2008 quote from Capuano to the Washington Post and tell me, dear blog reader, if your reaction is the same as mine:
To me, Capuano said, The Web is a necessary evil like cellphones.
That scares me and it puts a larger connotation of his involvement in this ongoing HAC debate, don’t you agree?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I’m a little confused…based on his quotes, Capuano sounds like he’s out of touch and that final quote could easily be parodied into “Congress is a necessary evil, like taxes.” But isn’t he trying to navigate to a more open place, in an archaic environment? In other words, isn’t he trying to make the rules closer to reality of what people are doing? It’s not a free speech crackdown.
I suspect much of the concern stems from an overblown sense of the relevance and importance of house.gov. Internet-savvy politicians should realize that running their own site, that has been search-engine optimized to be found more easily than house.gov, is a better strategy than worrying about whether they can link or embed content from the official website. Most people don’t even know who Mike Capuano is and they are not going to find him by browsing house.gov. I would think the goal for an elected official should be to keep the official sites limited and official, then use their private resources to build non-public funded issue sites that reinforce their “thought-leader” positions on issues…bottom line, those official websites are going to suck, so lower the playing field for the folks who don’t know any better and put your resources into a website free from public rules.
I suppose Capuano is trying to align HAC rules with an open system, but if that’s the case why create added regs in the first place and why specify video communications?
And, shouldn’t the Franking Commission tackle all Internet communications at once, or can the House.gov server handle blogs if congressmen start using Blogger en masse?
On your notion of elected officials using non-taxpayer funded resources for so-called “thought-leader issues,” I agree with you in concept but by principle, the elected person is still elected if he has a personal Blogger account which ties into my last paragraph.
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