It seems that the controversy about legislators using Twitter, YouTube, and other third party Web services may have come to a close. Both branches of Congress have recently revised their rules for how legislators can use Web services, and whether they can maintain content on third-party Web services and embed it onto their official Web sites. This is an important step in clearing up the earlier confusion and ensuring that clear standards are set. This is also a clear victory for the Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, which encouraged the committees to open the rules up for legislators to use third-party Web services.

Last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee changed its rules on how Senators can host content. Regulations now allow Senators to embed a video hosted by YouTube, link to a Flickr album, and make use of other third-party Web services as long as they abide by Franking rules: no product endorsement, no partisan material, and no personal (as opposed to official) material. Similarly, the Committee on House Administration has announced their new regulations, which will permit Members to use Web services in official capacities as well. The Representatives can post content to outside Web sites as long as the material is for “official purposes” and not personal or commercially related.

The now-defunct rules prohibiting the use of third-party services online was meant to preserve the non-commercial and non-partisan communications of Congress to constituents. There were already many members of Congress on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr; all services allowing them to reach out to constituents where the constituents already are. While these members by and large defied the old regulations, legislators can now use services that don’t live at house.gov.

It’s a good thing that the government doesn’t jump headfirst into every trendy online service, but it’s also good that Congress is taking a look at how its members interact with the public in light of new tools and services on the Internet. Federal agencies have also been using Twitter, and there are many new media users (like me!) that are excited to see whether legislators will use these new tools to communicate with us more effectively.

Of course, I’m most familiar with Twitter, so thats the exciting part this announcement for me. In fact,CDT has just launched our Twitter account, to complement our discussion on the Presidential transition. But legislators now have a plethora of options for their media, be it video, audio, or microblogs- and maybe we’ll give the House servers a break, too. Welcome to the 21st century, Congress!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under CDT, Open Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.