The College of Europe has been having a few teething problems with an attempt to extend its famed networking skills into the digital age.

The college, whose former students grace the upper echelons of European governments and public administrations, recently launched a blog platform to host contributions written by its alumni.

One of those alumni used the platform to describe José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, as a “shallow politician without credibility or any sense of the crisis now shaking the foundations of Brussels”. Mild though this criticism might be compared with the daily discourse in Commission staff restaurants, it appeared to be too much for the college’s authorities, who removed the offending post.

The college administration said it took down the entry because the author had not put his name to it as required. But the author, who then outed himself as Alfonso Ricciardelli, who attended the college in 2008-09, pointed out that an earlier, uncritical post published on the forum without a signature had not been taken down. The administration soon re-posted the entry – which was broadly that Barroso’s talk of federalism showed a gulf between the EU elite and European voters – with Ricciardelli’s name attached.

While artificial accusations about censorship were still flying, Eurosceptic campaign groups leapt on the incident to claim that doubts about the European Union were now infecting the College of Europe. Either that, or the college’s marketing department has worked out that every media launch needs a controversy.