Junior Minister Rosianne Cutajar has clarified that it was a Facebook upload glitch that resulted in it appearing as though she shared a taxpayer-funded video on her personal Facebook page before it appeared on the government’s official page Riformi.

According to the Standards Commissioner, publicly-funded videos must be shared from official channels, not personal Facebook pages of ministers or parliamentary secretaries. The Commissioner has said that only once the videos appear on official channels can they then be re-shared by the individual ministers’ pages.

Most ministers have adopted a loophole to this by using Facebook’s crossposting function to ensure that content goes live on both their official ministry pages and their personal pages simultaneously.

But this has its repercussions too. According to Cutajar, there was a glitch in this morning’s video upload.

“I confirmed with my communications team about what exactly happened this morning. It seems the video originally was uploaded on the Secretariat’s page but had to be removed because of a problem with the upload. I assure you that the Secretariat always acted according to the recommendations of the Standards Commissioner’s report and will continue to do so,” Cutajar told Lovin Malta.

It seems the video successfully went live on Cutajar’s personal page but not on the parliamentary secretariat’s personal page Riformi and therefore had to be re-uploaded, appearing to have been posted some 40 minutes after it appeared on Cutajar’s personal page.

Cutajar also said the video, which seeks to tackle the problem of gender stereotyping, will be boosted on her own profile at her own personal expense.

Lovin Malta also asked Cutajar the following questions but no replies were received by the time of publishing:

• Do you agree that the official page Riformi should not be tagging your personal page, if anything your personal page should be tagging the page Riformi?
• Are you aware that the Standards Commissioner’s guidelines say you should share the official Facebook page’s link rather than upload the video as your own on your personal page?
• Do you think it makes sense for a video created by taxpayer money to be at your disposal to boost rather than boosted by the ministry officially?

Other Cabinet members who continue to breach the rules or find loopholes include Transport Minister Ian Borg, Economy Minister Silvio Schembri and the Prime Minister himself Robert Abela, who seems to be doing the reverse of what the Standards Commissioner insists upon. Instead of publishing official content on the government’s page and then sharing it from his personal page, Abela often published official content on his personal page and gets the official government page to share his own page.

Meanwhile, more than 4,200 people have already signed a petition calling for an end to Facebook misuse by government officials and insisting that ministers should refund the taxpayer money they abused. The petition is part of a campaign launched by Lovin Malta’s show Kaxxaturi which also raised more than €6,000 and has already been seen watched by more than 315,000 people.

Have you donated and signed the petition yet? Visit kaxxaturi.com to join the campaign.