2026 should see leading EU politicians make a tentative and embarrassing foray into "new" social media platforms currently flavour of the moment.
In a non-paper not-published today, the European Commission set out plans for a "roadmap to smart citizen dialogue strategies."
After a period of consultation, the commission is to put several multi-million euro contracts out to tender to advise on implementing "digital communications with the next-gen citizen in an online world."
Early ideas include misappropriating technologies such as Twitch and Clubhouse many years after the next-gen currently discovering them will have become previous-gen.
EU commissioners and euro-MPs could use the emerging platforms to host yet more stilted "online ideation exchanges" with a predictable array of lobbyists and other eurobubble inhabitants, including a small number of staff members teed up to pose questions when it all gets a bit uncomfortably quiet.
The plan follows the mercifully brief flirtation with 'Tweetchats' that Eurocrats engaged in during a heady 2015 after discovering their pre-prepared interventions in MSN chatrooms had been disappearing into the ether for a decade.
The idea of being able to engage remotely with a captive audience of sycophants on a new slightly different forum is understood to have been key to securing top-level buy-in from the commission's political masters.
"It took the European Commission around 7 years to embrace the 'sheep-throwing' technology enabled by the Facebook platform," said a spokesperson. "By that time Facebook had retired the function, and the commission only narrowly averted a misunderstanding between a senior DG Agri official and a Basque farmer."
That same official was the heart of another social-media mishap last year over misuse of an aubergine emoji.
