Knowing the past to write the future: risks and challenges related with social media governance in government

Social media (self-)governance? A mixed-method study on the content and drivers of work-related social media use

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the publications on government social media research from the Scopus database from the period of 1998-2021.Based on the keywords used,482 documents related to government social media were retrieved and analysed using various tools. Microsoft Excel was used to conduct the frequency analysis, VOSviewer for data visualization and Harzig’s Publish or Perish for citation metrics and analysis. There is a continuous growth of publications on government social media research since 1998. The USA was found to be the largest contributor to government social media, followed by China. In addition, the role of social media in communication technology may take over most of the government services in delivering the information and services to the people. This paper provides a comprehensive compilation of articles offering a general overview of the leading trends and researchers to the development of government social media. This paper reports using standard bibliometric indicators such as the growth of publications, authorship patterns, collaboration and prolific authors, country contribution, most active institutions preferred journals and top-cited articles.

Public engagement on government social media platforms can boost public trust in government while also improving and speeding up the distribution of health information. The importance of public engagement and its widespread existence have promoted extensive academic research on this channel. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to identify and bridge gaps in theories and conceptual frameworks in studies of public engagement via government social media. Furthermore, the objective of this research is to establish a comprehensive framework for analyzing how the public's engagement on government social media during the COVID-19 pandemic is affected by elements including information quality, source credibility, social media characteristics, and personal trust. The PRISMA method is used to review publications from 2019. After an extensive systematic review procedure that involved searching for relevant publications and utilizing inclusion and exclusion criteria to retrieve those that met the study's purpose, 32 papers were finally selected from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Finally, this study's findings shed light on the interactions between the public and the government during COVID-19 and offer recommendations for further research on public engagement, including more diverse social media types, the expansion of public engagement forms on social media, and the adoption of different theory or model. This study provides more evidence for research on public online engagement and offers some practical implications for effective communication between governments and the public.

Government social media has garnered significant attention due to its impact on citizens' attitudes, prompting extensive academic research. This review aims to delineate a decade-spanning corpus of literature, discern prevalent research trends, and propose a prospective research agenda in this domain. Employing systematic literature review and PRISMA methodologies, our investigation identified 22 published articles through comprehensive keyword searches across Scopus, Google Scholar, CNKI, and ProQuest databases, ensuring a diverse representation of geographic areas to capture the global perspective on this issue. This study mainly utilize a mixed research methodology encompassing bibliometrics and content analysis to analyze data results. This paper conducted a bibliometric analysis revealing that the relationship between government social media usage and citizens' trust in the government remains a contentious topic. To delve deeper into this relationship, the selected literature were categorized into three distinct research themes through content analysis, forming a comprehensive conceptual framework. Upon meticulous analysis, the findings suggest that future research should explore the communication field more extensively, encompass a broader range of research topics, employ refined concepts, and examine the mediating role of audience behavior, particularly focusing on the behavior of young people. Furthermore, researchers are encouraged to adopt a more thorough and detailed systematic approach when reviewing relevant literature on government social media.

With advancement of technological tools, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in maintaining and improving social media platforms is becoming intriguing by each passing day. From content moderation to sentiment analyzing the AI tools are integrated in the day-to-day operations of social media platforms to curate the customized experience to enhance the users' interaction on the platforms. The chapter explores the various AI tools and software understanding their models and functioning to regulate the social media governance. It aims to investigate the influence of AI tools from content creation, marketing advertisements to impact on users' behavior. While discussing the positives of the AI involvement, the chapter also discusses the possible challenges of maintaining user privacy, data security and regulation of fake news. Understanding the role of collaborating governance, the author analyzed various statutes around the world to deal with ethical and legal implications of the AI in social media governance to suggest amicable solutions and way forward.

PurposeThe rise of social media such as Facebook and Twitter has provided employees with means to share work-related information. Increasingly, social media governance policies are implemented to negotiate the risks and opportunities of such behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to unveil the motivations behind managers’ attempts to govern these behaviors.Design/methodology/approachSemi-structured interviews were conducted with ten communication managers of various organizations. Higgins’ regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) was used to examine whether managers adopted a prevention or promotion focus to social media, and whether regulatory focus affected the measures taken toward social media governance.FindingsPrevention and promotion foci were both observed among managers, and differed per communication model. Managers who employed dialogic models of communication were primarily promotion-focused and emphasized opportunities to improve stakeholder relations, while managers who employed one-way models were primarily prevention-focused and highlighted the risks of social media (e.g. the risk of employees publishing messages that contradict corporate communication and confuse stakeholders). Social media governance differed depending on regulatory focus. In the prevention scheme managers usually attempted to regain control by restricting social media to private use only, while in the promotion focus managers trained and facilitated employees for work-related social media use, to various extends.Originality/valueBy examining the interplay of regulatory focus, communication models and governance, this paper sheds light on the rationale behind social media governance policies that are implemented in organizations.

PurposeWhen comparing the annotated relevance and the actual application of social media, enormous discrepancies show. This paper aims to introduce the concept of “Social Media Governance” as a means to accelerate the establishment of social media in communication practices and seeks to analyse its status quo in German organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe data presented here stem from a quantitative online survey among communication professionals that was carried out in Germany.FindingsThe results indicate that although many organizations claim to have strategies for social media communications, nine out of ten had no explicit regulatory frameworks. Strategic pillars, such as managerial commitment and a participative corporate culture, were reported by one third of the organizations. This is crucial, because correlation analyses have revealed that the presence of such structures has a positive effect on skill levels, strategies and the level of activity.Research limitations/implicationsIn terms of theory, the concept of governance may be used in order to analyze the dynamics of introducing new modes of online communication.Practical implicationsAccording to structuration theory, the actions of individual agents will only succeed if everyone involved can resort to structures in the sense of a common stock of (informal) rules and resources. This research indicates that public relations (PR) practices should focus on developing basic structures for social media communications and should not be limited to communications activities.Originality/valueWhile previous studies have focused on single aspects of social media governance, e.g. guidelines, very little research has been done on the overall concept. Also, the interconnection of strategic and structural aspects of social media communication has been neglected as a research topic so far.

Despite a rich history of scholarship on the governance of online spaces, social media platforms continue to both cause and facilitate harm. Many of the problems that manifest on social media are amplifications of enduring social inequities; however, this does not absolve social media companies from the responsibility to recognize and repair the harms they enable. Current social media governance approaches largely focus on removing individual content and accounts that violate platform policies, but they overlook the individuals and communities who experience harm. This is at best an oversight, and at worst, an extension of Western criminal justice systems that prioritize retribution over structural change via accountability and repair. Drawing from justice theories, we propose several key shifts for social media governance to better recognize and repair harm.

While social media represents a broad range of benefits to organisations and institutions, such as enhanced brand engagement, it also presents challenges and risks to reputation and security, such as confidentiality breaches. Employee use of popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, both at work and about work has resulted in organisations developing social media policies and guidelines as part of contemporary governance practice. This paper investigates this recent approach to corporate governance by examining 20 social media policies and guidelines from a sample of corporate, government and third sector organisations that are active social media users. It develops a basic framework for social media governance based on the 13 common themes that emerge from the sample, including confidentiality, disclosure and the public-private divide of social media usage. It draws on social contract theory and considers its importance to the field of social media governance. Key implications for managers who are tasked with developing and implementing social media policies and guidelines are discussed.

Social media definition and the governance challenge: An introduction to the special issue

This introduction to a special issue of Telecommunications Policy entitled Governance of Social Media begins with a definition of social media that informs all contributions in the special issue. A section describing the challenges associated with the governance of social media is presented next, followed by an overview of the various articles included in the special issue.While the Internet and the World Wide Web have always been used to facilitate social interaction, the emergence and rapid diffusion of Web 2.0 functionalities during the first decade of the new millennium enabled an evolutionary leap forward in the social component of web use. This and falling costs for online data storage made it feasible for the first time to offer masses of Internet users access to an array of user-centric spaces they could populate with user-generated content, along with a correspondingly diverse set of opportunities for linking these spaces together to form virtual social networks.To define “social media” for our current purposes, we synthesize definitions presented in the literature and identify the following commonalities among current social media services:1) Social media services are (currently) Web 2.0 Internet-based applications,2) User-generated content is the lifeblood of social media,3) Individuals and groups create user-specific profiles for a site or app designed and maintained by a social media service,4) Social media services facilitate the development of social networks online by connecting a profile with those of other individuals and/or groups.Transformative communication technologies have always called for regulatory innovation. Theodor Vail’s vision of “one policy, one system, universal service” preceded more than one-hundred years of innovative regulations aimed at connecting all Americans to a single telephone network. The sinking of the Titanic, caused in part by “chaos in the spectrum” led to the Radio Act of 1912 and the creation of a command and control model designed to regulate broadcast radio. Safe-harbor hours were put in place after a father and son heard George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine over the radio in their car. The fairness doctrine and the minority tax certificate program were designed to address inequalities in the broadcast television industry. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act responded to intellectual property concerns raised by a global Internet and the FCC’s 700mhz auction was the result of demand for smarter mobile phones. Now we must consider the role of regulatory innovation in response to the emergence of social media.

Internet governance by social media platforms

This study examines the impact of customer relationship management (CRM) practices and social media marketing (SMM) activities on customer retention among MSMEs in Aceh. It considers the dual role of social media in relationship management (CRM) and business engagement (SMM). Recognizing the widespread use of social media, the study explores different stages of its adoption and utilization in business. A formalized social media business profile is used as the moderating variable, defined by a firm's formal allocation of responsibility, outsourcing, funding, governance of social media, and broader changes to structure, processes, leadership, training, and culture. Data was collected from 565 MSMEs using questionnaires and analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and multi-group analysis. The results demonstrated a high predictive power of the model on customer retention. Within CRM, the findings indicated a significant difference in the effect of key customer focus on customer retention, with higher effects observed in MSMEs that do not formalize their social media business profiles. Additionally, technology-based CRM showed significantly higher effects on customer retention for those who formalize their social media profiles. Within SMM, the study revealed significant differences in the effects of customization and trendiness on customer retention, both of which were more pronounced in MSMEs without formalized social media profiles. Furthermore, word-of-mouth had a significantly higher impact on customer retention for MSMEs with formalized social media profiles. This research contributes theoretically by developing an integrated framework that identifies how key customer focus, CRM organization, knowledge management, technology-based CRM, customization, entertainment, interaction, trendiness, and word-of-mouth influence customer retention. It also explores the moderating effects of formalized social media business profiles on CRM practices and SMM activities within MSMEs.

Aims: This narrative review considers traditional strategies for regulating alcohol marketing and their applicability to digital media. Method: Drawing on international research, case studies, and reports, we examine the applicability of (1) comprehensive or partial bans; (2) placement restrictions; (3) content restrictions; and (4) counter-advertising. Results: Comprehensive bans on advertising are generally the most effective option. A partial ban applying to digital media would make some lesser contribution to reducing exposure, but will usually simply result in the promotional budget being shifted to whichever media remain less strictly regulated. Limits on the placement of marketing have more salience for traditional media than for most digital media, which can be individualized and targeted. Content restrictions play a limited role in reducing exposure as they are not concerned with marketing volume, but with the way in which alcohol is represented. Conclusions: Although these traditional strategies have a role in regulating digital media and are applied in certain international jurisdictions, new regulatory approaches are needed. These may include the use of artificial intelligence for monitoring, transparency requirements, and privacy law rights and duties. Opportunities to regulate alcohol marketing online will need to be addressed and seized as they arise in the current volatile policy environment concerning the governance of social media.

This article proceeds as follows: Part II briefly addresses the theoretical arguments regarding the pros and cons of various governance strategies, focusing on the advantages, disadvantages and pitfalls of reliance on private parties. In Part III, the article describes, in general terms, the above-mentioned empirical study, explaining its methodology, the specific challenges to its design and implementation, and how these were met. The discussion specifically centers on a survey taken to establish the nature of social norms. Part IV presents a specific test case: whether pseudonymity should be permitted in social media or should “real names” be mandatory. Part V briefly discusses insights that the “real names” test case might provide for the broader questions regarding justice and fairness in social media governance. The article concludes with yet another context, the “right to be forgotten,” which might provide additional insights into the important research questions this project and others begin to address. It further notes additional extensions of the methodological design this article introduces.