If you thought that the online debate about CETA (the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) was over, think again!

Last Wednesday the European Parliament was called to vote on a request submitted by 89 MEPs to refer CETA to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an opinion.

As reported by officials from the EP, the question was whether the free trade deal’s investor protection provisions are in line with the right of governments to regulate in order to achieve legitimate public policy aims, such as protecting health, safety or the environment.

The referral request was rejected by 419 votes to 258 in favour, with 22 abstentions. The debate on Twitter was pretty heated with more than 400 tweets posted in a couple of hours. Many MEPs were not happy with the outcome of the vote.

The most active MEPs on CETA were Michèle Rivasi (@MicheleRivasi), Lola Sanchez Caldentey (@lolapodemos) and Yannik Jadot (@yjadot); but the most popular tweets on CETA were posted by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon), Lola Sanchez Caldentey (@lolapodemos) and Ernest Urtasun (@ernesturtasun).

On a more general note, the most active MEPs of the entire plenary were, as it happend in October, Julia Reid (@julia_reid), Michal Boni (@michalBoni) and Marie Christine Vergiat (@mcvergiat).

Compared to other accounts, these three accounts post way more retweets than first-hand tweets on lots of diffeetn topics. Are they cheating in the Twitter race? Well, monitoring discussions, reading the tweets and evaluating if they appropriate or not to share can take up quite some time. They can be classified as curators more than generators.

Finally, the most popular tweets of the entire plenary were posted once again by the uber-popular Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) and Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel). Interesting to see that none of them was about the topics discussed at the last plenary.

See you at the next EP plenary 😉

Photo by jeshoots.com