Malta's Ministers: Give Back The Taxpayer Money You Used On Your Personal Facebook Pages
- Target:
- The Parliament of Malta
- Region:
- Malta
For the last seven years, most Maltese ministries invested in their minister’s personal Facebook page instead of developing publicly-owned social media platforms that can be transferred from minister to minister.
At least €1.2 million were spent on Facebook boosts between 2013 and 2017, at a time when most ministries had no Facebook pages. The real amount of misused money is likely to be much higher considering production costs involved in content creation.
The Standards Commissioner said this constituted “widespread misuse of public resources” and he ordered the practice to stop immediately. A criminal investigation is underway to see if this amounts to misappropriation of public funds.
Most ministries have now set up official pages - a great victory for taxpayers who now own these important social media assets. This means taxpayer money can be used more efficiently to promote government initiatives that are in the public interest.
We believe this is a good start, but more must be done to ensure it does not happen again by future governments.
Visit www.kaxxaturi.com to donate.
We demand:
1. A full audit of the social media accounts of ministers and parliamentary secretaries, past and present, to see that any misused money is returned to the taxpayer
2. The immediate publication of the Cabinet’s new Social Media Code so the public can be conscious of the rules and what they allow
3. A proper debate in Parliament about this issue and a wider discussion about how government spends taxpayer’s money on advertising
4. A commitment that public funds will no longer be used to blur the lines between official government communication and partisan propaganda or the promotion of individual MPs
5. An annual report or other mechanism by which ministers and parliamentary secretaries give a full and transparent account of their social media activity and advertising
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The Malta's Ministers: Give Back The Taxpayer Money You Used On Your Personal Facebook Pages petition to The Parliament of Malta was written by Kaxxaturi and is in the category Local Government at GoPetition.