My Take | Hong Kong government needs lessons on using internet

For a government that is always banging on about innovation and technology, it has displayed a woeful lack of awareness about internet security and the use of social media as a public relations tool.

Few people paid much attention to Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s Facebook page until pictures of scantily clad young female models appeared on his list of friends. His office said his Facebook account was hacked on Christmas Eve, with pictures added and some messages deleted. We assumed Leung didn’t add the girls to his friends’ list, but you never know.

It’s not clear when officials became aware of the hack, and whether they were alerted to it by an enhanced Facebook security feature or only read about it first in a local newspaper.

Leung’s account is “closed”, meaning that the public can look at what he has published, but only those he has added as friends can press the “like” function and comment on his posts. It’s not known how many friends he has as his privacy settings do not disclose the number.

Meanwhile, the gazette of the controversial appointment of former education chief Arthur Li Kwok-cheung to be the chairman of the University of Hong Kong council inadvertently went online hours before scheduled. Someone at the Government Logistics Department apparently inputted the publication date as January 1, 2015 instead of December 31, 2015. Considering the contentious nature of the appointment and that a gazette has the force of law, the administration might have tasked more experienced staff to do the job.

In October, the police force launched a Facebook account to improve its image with the public after the Occupy protests. In just one day, it collected thousands of comments from Hongkongers angry about police behaviour.