#euco and Berlusconi: the power of Twitter

The Euro-web-twiter-sphere lived an amazing episode during the EU summit this week: the Twit-wall, showing all the tweets using the hashtag #euco was setup for everyone to see.

Italian tweeter-res used this opportunity to protest S Berlusconi – who very narrowly won a confidence vote this week – mostly by tweeting quotes from il calvaliere. (full disclosure: I retweeted some of them, since Berlusconi’s quotes can be ridiculously funny). The italian tweets quickly took over the twit-wall and the Council decided to shut it down early.

This anecdote made it outside the EU-geek world (*) when the guardian published a story on the matter, along with other internet sources [*,*,*,*,*,*].

Italian tweeter-ers are continuing the movement by trying to push #mpietropoli, an hashtag derived from the name of one of the user (@mpietropoli) identified by the guardian as key to the tweet-wall shutdown, in the Trending Topics of twitter.

Those are the facts. Now what is my conclusion ? This story shows how much twitter can be a place where people can express their opinion and be part of a protesting campaign, with a real effect (in that case, shutting down the tweet-wall). Those tweets were the twitter equivalent of protester shooting in front of the Justus Lipsius.

In short: Twitter is a place of expression and people are using it was such, not only to tell the world they are having a sandwich for lunch, but also to raise their voices as citizens.

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