Government Social Media Research Articles

Bibliometric Analysis: Analysis of Government Social Media Innovations from 2012 to 2023

Government social media innovation is a trend carried out as an effort to respond to needs in the era of technological development and as an effort to improve services, especially in the public sector. Therefore, government social media innovation has become one of the research topics developed in recent years. As research on the topic of government social media innovation continues to develop, stakeholders need an up-to-date perspective on government social media innovation research. The aim of this research is to provide an objective and accurate summary of government social media innovation research using 194 documents taken from the Scopus database and analyzed using a bibliometric approach. Research was analyzed by publication per year, country of contributor, subject area, author, affiliation, and source. This research uses the CiteSpace application to analyze connectivity trends on related topics using keywords and reference nodes. The results of this research are useful for identifying clusters and research in communities such as royal colleges, sustainable development, public service delivery, and other clusters. This research can contribute to the body of knowledge quantitatively and accurately in terms of contributing to the knowledge map regarding government social media innovation and can be used as material for research reviews on similar topics and developed in the future.

Identifying the factors affecting individuals’ trust to use social media for e-government services: a conceptual model

Trust is an important determinant towards individuals’ acceptance to use social media for e-government services. However, despite of its growing importance there is a dearth of prior research to investigate the antecedents that can develop individuals’ trust for the usage of social media as a technology platform for e-government services. To address this gap, this paper aims to identify those factors that can affect individuals trust in using social media for e-government services. This paper proposes a new model that identifies trust enabling factors to use government social media services from multiple perspectives which are: individual characteristics, government factors, risk factors and social media characteristics. The findings of this paper can be useful for government organizations in assisting them to develop appropriate strategies for enhancing citizens trust towards such services.

Is There a Relationship Between New Media and the Number of Recorded Covid-19 Cases in Ghana? No! Evidence from a Content Analysis of the Twitter Posts of Key Ghanaian State Actors in the First Year of the Pandemic

The covid 19 pandemic led to a public health crises which aside leading to the death of more than four hundred and fifty thousand people (WHO, 2020a), has also disrupted the way people live, by forcing us to make changes to how we work, school and live our social lives. Governments worldwide devised many strategies to help slow down the spread of the virus and reduce its impact on the economy and livelihoods of people. Eventhough social media platforms played a key role in information dissemination and awareness creation in relation to the novel Corona Virus, it is unknown if the activity of key government social media accounts have any relationship with the number of recorded cases. The researchers used a quantitative content analysis strategy to analyse the posts of 5 key Ghanaian government accounts on Twitter between 11 th March 2020 and 11 th March 2021, in relation to certain Covid 19 keywords. The researchers found that, no correlation exists between the Twitter posts of key government accounts and number of recorded Covid-19 cases in Ghana. The study also shows that, the lowest number of Covid 19 related tweets were posted in December 2020, the month of the Ghanaian elections, whereas, the highest number of Covid 19 related tweets were posted in March 2020, the month in which the first case was detected in Ghana. The researchers conclude that eventhough social media can conttribute to crises and emergency communications, social media alone as a crises communication strategy may not be enough and must be paired with other traditional forms of communication such as radio. Keywords: Social Media, Crises Communications, Twitter, Covid 19, Pandemic Communications DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/104-01 Publication date: January 31 st 2023

Regulating alcohol advertising for public health and welfare in the age of digital marketing: challenges and options

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.

Addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: A content analysis of government social media platforms in England and Italy during 2020–2021

ObjectivesThis study investigates how England's and Italy's Public Health Governmental Departments addressed COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy (VH) on social media platforms. Study designA conventional content analysis of the social media accounts of Public Health England (PHE), currently the UK Health Security Agency, and the Italian Ministry of Health (IMH) were performed during December 1st, 2020–April 30th, 2021. MethodsA total of 531 and 110 posts were extracted from the accounts of PHE and the IMH respectively. ResultsSimilar themes were identified in the government social media posts from both countries, however, significant differences in theme distribution were noted. In England, the most common theme around COVID-19 vaccinations was the vaccine rollout (51%), while themes aimed at addressing VH specifically (44.8%) were debunking vaccine myths (10.5%), reaching/addressing minorities (8.5%), institutional encouragement (13.4%), and benefits of vaccines (12.4%). In contrast, Italian government posts majorly discussed COVID-19 vaccine news and updates (27.3%). Posts addressing VH (62.7%) focused on encouraging vaccination (37.3%), describing the benefits of vaccines (17.3%), debunking myths (4.5%), and communication campaigns (3.6%). ConclusionsApproximately half of British and Italian government social media posts on COVID-19 were related to addressing vaccine hesitancy. Although similar themes were evident, there were also themes unique to each country.

The Role of Social Media in Government Communication During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of KSA

This study aims to explore the role of official government social media accounts as a source of information during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the types of information that was posted on these accounts and the tools that were used to convey the content to the users. An online survey was conducted to answer the study questions. Findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the ways and the goals of communication from the government to the citizens to engage them in the process and enable them to interact with the content and the communicator.

Women's Perspectives on Harm and Justice after Online Harassment

Social media platforms aspire to create online experiences where users can participate safely and equitably. However, women around the world experience widespread online harassment, including insults, stalking, aggression, threats, and non-consensual sharing of sexual photos. This article describes women's perceptions of harm associated with online harassment and preferred platform responses to that harm. We conducted a survey in 14 geographic regions around the world (N = 3,993), focusing on regions whose perspectives have been insufficiently elevated in social media governance decisions (e.g. Mongolia, Cameroon). Results show that, on average, women perceive greater harm associated with online harassment than men, especially for non-consensual image sharing. Women also prefer most platform responses compared to men, especially removing content and banning users; however, women are less favorable towards payment as a response. Addressing global gender-based violence online requires understanding how women experience online harms and how they wish for it to be addressed. This is especially important given that the people who build and govern technology are not typically those who are most likely to experience online harms.

Are citizens engaging with government social media Covid 19 pandemic information? Why media richness and dialogic loop features matter

AbstractThis study investigated the extent to which media richness, dialogic loop, and content type affect citizen engagement with local government social media information on the Covid‐19 pandemic. Quantitative content analysis through scraping of Facebook posts by the local government was employed in this study. Effects of the determinant variables was tested using negative binomial regression. Results show that both media richness and dialogic loop have significant and positive effects on citizens' engagement. This means that the richer the media, and the more dialogic features present in a Facebook post, the higher the turnout of reactions, shares, and comments of such post. Content type, on the other hand, was found to have no significant effect, implying that the number of content categories a certain post belongs to does not influence engagement from citizens. The study focused only on the local government's pandemic information posted on Facebook. Local governments should continue utilizing social media in disseminating pandemic information, and in the process, consider maximum utilization of the social media features to generate more engagement from its citizens. This study is the first to determine the factors affecting citizen engagement with government social media during the Covid‐19 pandemic in the Philippine context.

Government Digital Transformation: Understanding the Role of Government Social Media

Government social media has been integrated as part of the government administrative tools to improve public service and promote public goals. However, the current government information literature is limited to understanding government social media adoption and its purpose for political marketing. The present study seeks to understand the role of government social media in promoting government digital initiatives (i.e., government-backed digital currency). The study validated the inter-relationships between government social media effort, privacy concerns, trust in technology, reachability, and citizens' participation in government-initiated digital innovations. A total of 505 responses from Chinese citizens were collected through an online self-administered questionnaire survey, and the data was submitted to a two-stage Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling-Artificial Neural Network analysis. The analytic results revealed that privacy concerns, trust in technology, and reachability positively influence digital participation. In addition, the information quality and perception of trust in government social media have significant positive influences on government social media engagement. The study provides strategic practical suggestions to government agencies in effectively utilizing social media as a communication platform to foster citizens' participation in government's digital initiatives.

How can we detect Homophobia and Transphobia? Experiments in a multilingual code-mixed setting for social media governance

Homophobia or Transphobia can be defined as the hatred, discomfort, or dislike of lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual people. Studies have shown that these individuals were more likely to develop mental health issues, likely due to being subjected to more forms of abuse on social media. Hence there is an ardent need to develop automated abusive speech detection systems to tackle the abusive content on social media. There has been an elevation in hate speech or abuse and this paper focuses on the LGBTQIA+ community. Due to the shortage of resources in the said study area, we hypothesize that data augmentation via Pseudolabeling by transliterating the code-mixed text to the parent language will improve the models’ performances on the newly constructed dataset. We put our hypothesis into testing, and studied the performances of several multilingual language models for our cause.

Examining Board and Executive Staff Perceptions of Social Media in National Sport Organizations

The purpose of this paper was to highlight (1) how (if at all) social media is governed as a marketing communication channel and (2) whether there is conceptual congruence between board and executive staff with regards to social media in their organizations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with one board member and one executive staff member from 22 Canadian national sport organizations. Results suggest nil governance and strategic oversight of social media; however, board and executive staff are seemingly aligned in this position. While having conceptual congruence is important for the organization’s collective achievement, it is inherently problematic that neither side sees value in moving the discussion of social media to a governing level given its implications on marketing communication efforts. At the board level, NSOs should proactively establish a digital strategy considering the importance of the social (and digital) media function in the 21st century sport business landscape.

How to Promote Public Engagement and Enhance Sentiment Through Government Social Media During the COVID-19 Crisis

In the period of public health crisis, effective and efficient transmission of crisis information to the public through social media is an important support for achieving social stability and orderly online public engagement. From the perspective of public value management, this study systematically investigated how local government agencies in China used social media to promote public engagement and raise public sentiment during the COVID-19 crisis. Using data captured from the “Wuhan Release” Sina Weibo account, the authors studied the factors that influence public engagement, including information sources, language styles, and media types. Further, it explores the influence of the interactive effects of public value with information sources, language styles, and media types on public engagement and public sentiment. The results show that the consistency of government response content and public value promotes public engagement and raises public sentiment. This research provides enlightenment and ideas for cognition, understanding and governance of public opinion in practice.

Promoting public engagement with household waste separation through government social media: A case study of Shanghai

Government agencies around the world are increasingly using social media to promote public engagement with government-initiated activities, such as Household Waste Separation (HWS). However, existing studies fail to examine how governments can use their official social media accounts to promote public engagement with HWS. This pioneering study investigates the effects of dialogic loop, media richness, content theme, and emotional valence on public engagement with HWS through Government Social Media (GSM). Moreover, the influencing mechanisms are explored by examining the moderating role of social media capital. In total, 1795 posts were scraped from the official Sina Weibo accounts of seventeen Shanghai governments and later analyzed. Results reveal that dialogic loop positively predicts public engagement with HWS through GSM, but media richness negatively affects public engagement. Content themes have significantly different impacts on the level of public engagement with HWS through GSM. Unexpectedly, the effect of emotional valence is not significant. This study is the first of its kind to demonstrate the moderating role of social media capital which is seen to weaken the positive effect of dialogic loop on public engagement with HWS through GSM and mitigate the negative effect of media richness.

Social Media Movement and Covid-19 Prevention in Indonesia

The utilization of social media in distributing the information towards covid-19 pandemi is one of the effort from government and society. The access to information through social media has contribute to the pandemi prevention process by re-posting the pictures about health protocol standard. This study aims to characterize the representation of information from social movements and Covid-19 prevention in Indonesia carried out on Instagram social media in 2020-2021. Using qualitative content analysis, manually fetchingInstagram posts with relevant metadata from a social media influencer account @dr.tirta, a government social media account @kemenkes_ri, and an account initiated by public @pandemitalks. Data was collected from March 2020 to June 2021, with 1123 key content and 164 extracted codes analyzed using thematic analysis. It was found that social media is one of the media relied on by the public in accessing Covid 19 information. The input is divided into three general categories including the information needs of the Indonesian people, community problems during the Covid-19 pandemi, and government regulations and policies. And 15 themes that emerged as outputs included health protocols, care, treatment of covid patients, diet and lifestyle, diagnosis and treatment, criticism, innuendo, pregnant women and children, psychology, wrong behavior and habits, misinformation. wrong, political, economic impact and social and cultural impact. Analysis of Instagram post content during a public health crisis can provide new information and realistic insights in a crisis and identify topics of public interest or concern. What information is gathered in this way can help policymakers identify the most critical issues from a public perspective and utilize the knowledge gained to manage ongoing and future pandemis

A Bibliometric Study of Social Media as a e-Government Public Services

Social media is used as an essential tool of government communication to the public and a form of service from e-government. This paper aims to identify the scientific development of social media themes in public communication services. This paper used bibliometric technic to investigate the broad overview of media studies on government public services. The analysis includes a citation and co-citation analysis, bibliographical coupling, and co-occurrence analysis. The data is taken from the Scopus database for 2010- 2021 with the source of the journal article type. The analysis results show the dynamics of increasing and decreasing the number of government social media studies. The bibliometric analysis also shows the most contributing journal sources, the most productive authors, the most cited journal articles, co-citations between authors, and clusters of themes that develop from social media themes used by the government in communicating and serving the public.

Does Citizen Engagement With Government Social Media Accounts Differ During the Different Stages of Public Health Crises? An Empirical Examination of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has created one of the greatest challenges to humankind, developing long-lasting socio-economic impacts on our health and wellbeing, employment, and global economy. Citizen engagement with government social media accounts has proven crucial for the effective communication and management of public health crisis. Although much research has explored the societal impact of the pandemic, extant literature has failed to create a systematic and dynamic model that examines the formation mechanism of citizen engagement with government social media accounts at the different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study fills this gap by employing the Heuristic-Systematic Model and investigating the effects of the heuristic clues including social media capital, information richness, language features, dialogic loop, and the systematic clue including content types, on citizen engagement with government social media across three different stages of the pandemic, employing the moderating role of emotional valence.MethodsThe proposed model is validated by scraping 16,710 posts from 22 provincial and municipal government micro-blog accounts in the Hubei province, China.ResultsResults show that the positive effects of social media capital on citizen engagement were observed at all stages. However, the effects of information richness, language features, dialogic loop, and content types, and the moderating effect of emotional valence, varied across the different pandemic development stages.ConclusionsThe findings provide suggestions for the further effective use of government social media, and better cope with crises. Government agencies should pay attention to the content and form of information shared, using technical means to analyze the information needs of citizens at different stages of public health emergencies, understanding the content most concerned by citizens, and formulating the content type of posts.

How does government microblog affect tourism market value? The perspective of signaling theory

The emotion of social media users has been found to impact market value, but the mechanism of emotion transmission needs to be further explored. Based on the signaling theory, this study formulates the hypothesis that government microblog affects tourism market value by affecting consumers' emotion. A total of 10020 pieces of observation data on four famous Chinese scenic spots are analyzed with text analysis technique, and the correlations between government microblog emotion, comment emotion, and market value are confirmed. Besides, the moderating roles played by the COVID-19 epidemic and tourism attention are verified, and the crowding-out effect of tourism attention on comment emotion is validated. This study provides new understandings of signal transmission as well as practical suggestions for promoting the development of tourism through government social media in the context of COVID-19.

Investigating information dissemination and citizen engagement through government social media during the COVID-19 crisis

PurposeThis study explores how effectively the Indian government utilized social media to communicate emergency information and promote citizen engagement and awareness during the first wave of COVID-19 crisis.Design/methodology/approachThis research investigates the tweets scraped from the official Twitter handle “CovidnewsbyMIB” of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Government of India; the authors unearthed patterns in the communications between the government and its citizens by adopting various social media analysis techniques. Further, the authors also tried to examine the influence of media richness and dialogic loop on citizen engagement through government social media (CEGSM) using multivariate analysis method.FindingsThe results highlighted clusters of words/terms present in the tweets related to COVID-19 combating strategies, guidelines, and updates. The authors also found that media richness has a significant positive relationship with CEGSM, but dialogic loop has an insignificant relationship with CEGSM.Originality/valueThis study provides suggestions to government agencies about ways to improve CEGSM by enhancing media richness and dialogic loop elements such as surveys, polls, and responses in the crisis communication.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0307.

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

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify the most frequent themes related with social media governance in government by year, analyzing if these themes have evolved over time, as well as highlighting the main risks and challenges found as further research opportunities.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the authors have extracted 431 abstracts from Scopus database. Then, abstracts were grouped by year to apply topic modeling to discover the underlying topics. Specifically, the authors have applied latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm to identify the most frequent topics by year.FindingsThe results reveal 19 important topics related with social media governance in government. Then, these topics were assigned to each year to identify the evolution of the research themes over the years, proposing interesting avenues for further research based on the identification of the main risks and challenges.Practical implicationsThe proposed research methodology can be applied not only for research purposes but also to discover themes in any discourse with applications in politics, marketing, business, etc. In addition, it can be used to save time and costs analyzing citizen comments in public debates to identify the most important topics.Originality/valueThis study can serve to highlight gaps in the literature, opening the possibility that researchers can adequately position their inquiries, as well as to be aware of overstudied themes to pay less attention to them in future projects. In addition, the results of this study could serve as a starting point for other researchers to analyze connections between topics, propose theories that explain what was found and validate them in future studies.

Corpus-assisted analysis of legitimation strategies in government social media communication

When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to (1) personal authority of policymakers, (2) impersonal authority of rules or documents and (3) goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government (42,618 words) which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets.