My Thoughts About the PHL’s Guidelines for the Use of Twitter, Facebook

Do we really have to limit ourselves in terms of social networking sites? Yes, but not to the extent of controlling what we want to post on these sites for our personal accounts.

After the incident of Mislang, speech writer of Pres. Noynoy Aquino, where she tweeted the ‘wine sucks’ during their visit to Vietnam, negative remarks where thrown to her for the so-called ‘irresponsible’ actions of a government official.

For me, given that Mislang used her own personal Twitter account to post those comments, she should not be called ‘irresponsible’ and be asked to resign. It is her freedom to say whatever she wants. If she’s posting it on a government-named Twitter account, for instance @govph, then that’s the time we could name her all the negative names we could give.

I read a blog post today about the Palace’s ‘guidelines for the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.’ Report says they’ll be issuing these guidelines soon to all government employees. With this, expect that these government employees will have no freedom of expression using their social networking accounts. Unless the guidelines will be pro-freedom of speech, this new policy will just cover one of our precious rights.