There have been numerous memorable moments from Greece’s roller coaster debt crisis. Think jubilant protesters celebrating Sunday’s No vote in Athens, or Yanis Varoufakis, departing from political office on his Yamaha motorbike.
But it is perhaps Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission chief, who best encapsulates the way in which social media has defined the current crisis, creating both opportunities and pitfalls for politicians, and a source of vivid, unmediated real-time information for everyone else.
On Tuesday Juncker told parliament in Strasbourg that he opposed “Grexit”. A group of MEPs, some from UKIP, then spotted that Juncker was engrossed in his phone, rather than listening to the debate. They began to heckle him.
Speaking in French, an irritated Juncker told them he was busy swapping messages with Alexis Tsipras. “Stop all this chatter about me looking at my telephone all the time. I am texting, as they say in Franglais, with the Greek prime minister,” he said defiantly, adding: “I’m doing my work.”
Facebook posts
Meanwhile, Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, used Facebook to post his latest thoughts on how the debt crisis might be resolved. He told his 800,000 Facebook followers that Europe was finished unless it stopped being the “prisoner of rules and bureaucracy” and acted in the spirit of solidarity.
In crises gone by, European leaders were able to negotiate in secret. Their decisions were revealed afterwards, via leaks, briefings, or wordy press releases. During the economic crises of the 1970s, for example, what really went on only become known years later when those involved, like Tony Benn, penned their memoirs.
The current Greek crisis, by contrast, has played out minute by minute, tweet by tweet, across Twitter, Facebook and newspaper live blogs. Twitter hasn’t merely reflected fast-moving events: it has actively shaped them.
Some of the EU’s protagonists have revealed policy positions on Twitter; traders have moved markets on the (sometimes unsubstantiated) basis of 140 characters. – (Guardian service)