Twitter’s been taking a lot of flak from a lot of people recently, it seems. Earlier this month, the movie industry blamed Twitter for the lackluster performance of a series of summer stinkers. The latest attack on Twitter, though, puts that one to shame – Germany is claiming that Twitter is threatening to undermine the entire democratic political process.

Wow. All this from a micro-blogging platform that most of the world thinks is all about “making a sandwich.”

Let’s provide a bit of background. Last Sunday, Germany held some regional elections. At those elections they take “exit polls” – basically, people stand outside the polls and ask voters who they voted for. After the polls are closed, the media announces the results of the exit polls – basically declaring a winner before the votes have even been counted.

Why do they do this? Because if they didn’t, we’d actually have to wait until votes were counted to declare a winner, instead of getting that information two hours after the polls were closed. Bear in mind, we’re talking about a tiny time difference here – but that’s what our culture has become, a gaggle of people who expect instantaneous information.

Apparently Twitter is a bit too “instantaneous” for Germany, though – last Sunday, two hours before the polls had actually closed, exit polls were “leaked” onto Twitter – and they turned out to be highly accurate numbers, within one percentage point of the actual exit polls released two hours later.

Why is that a problem, you ask? Because if people know the results of the exit polls before the voting is actually closed, they might be more likely to run out and do some last-minute voting for their candidate. Any way you shake it, voting is supposed to be a secret act, and knowing the results in real-time means that the democratic process isn’t going to be working the same way that it has been all this time.

Germany has general elections next month. In the worst-case scenario, if exit poll information for those general elections were to be leaked early, it would be relatively easy for the loser to argue that the election was influenced by the exit poll data, and contest or even throw out the original election results as invalid. That would be… bad.

Anyone caught leaking actual exit poll information is subject to a fine of up to €50,000 – but only if it can be shown definitively that the information leaked is based on actual exit poll data, and not just hearsay. That’s going to be hard for German election officials to prove, since Twitter is based entirely on hearsay. It’s a safe bet that, in the worst case scenario, they’ll go after the original leakers, and not the numerous people who retweeted the information – after all, a retweet is simply hearsay.

At least they’re being realistic about their ability to control Twitter. Rather than rail against the microblogging service, Germany is realizing that Twitter is changing the way and the speed with which people communicate, saying that they may simply be forced to do away with the process of exit polling altogether. Heaven forbid we have to wait one or even two days for election results – in today’s world of always-on, instant-access information, that’s quite a long time.

I, for one, am sick of hearing Twitter take the blame for bad planning or bad practices that have been able to survive until now because people didn’t know about them. Exit polling is a stupid, redundant idea, and that information was always being leaked – it’s just that before, the effect of those leaks was minimal. Hollywood puts the blame on Twitter, saying that people sharing their opinions about bad Hollywood movies caused them to perform poorly – but they never take the blame themselves for making a bunch of crappy movies. No, they blame Twitter for allowing people to tell each other how bad the movies were.

Twitter is a tool – nothing more, nothing less. If access to information means that a few institutions are going to suffer, then it’s safe to say that those institutions were always going to suffer, at one point or another – if it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been another means of communication. Information wants to be free, as the saying goes – Twitter’s just one method of making it so.