The Commissioner for Standards in Public Life George Hyzler found that it is widespread practice for ministers to use public resources in the generation of content for their personal pages on Facebook and other social media.

The Commissioner has concluded that this is an abuse because the ministers in question are using public resources to raise their personal and political profiles.

The Commissioner has stated that content generated using public resources should be uploaded to official sites. "After the content is published in this manner, ministers can then share it through their personal social media accounts. However, public resources should not be used to produce material that is uploaded directly to ministers' social media accounts."

This decision was reached after a complaint filed by Christian Peregin, CEO of Lovin Malta.

The Commissioner said that he took material uploaded on the personal pages of five ministers, and found that only one had shown good practice, while the other four made bad use of public resources.

In his report, the Commissioner, published guidelines which were already discussed with the government, and were accepted. The Commissioner said that this is a positive development, and took note of the government's cooperation.

This is the second case involving social media to be decided by the Standards Commissioner. The first case involved Minister Konrad Mizzi and was decided in December 2019. In that case the Commissioner concluded that ministers should not use public resources to maintain their personal Facebook pages or produce content for those pages, even if such content was related to their official duties.

"A clear distinction should be maintained between a minister's personal channels of communication and the official channels of ministries or departments of government, and only the latter should be maintained using public resources."

PN calls for police investigation

The PN, in a statement on this issue, said that this situation proves how there is no distinction between the PL and government, “so much so that public funds are being used to advertice politicians on social media.”

The PN said that the ministers should pay back the public funds they spent on their personal social media advertising. “If this is not done, PL Ministers would not only be hard headed in the misuse of public funds, but would also be exposing themselves to criminal proceedings. The PN expects the police to investigate this abuse of public funds without delay.”