Social media monitoring: Responsive governance in the shadow of surveillance?

Abstract

Social media monitoring, which promises several advantages such as early warning and reputation management, is gradually becoming common practice in public organizations in the Netherlands. From a citizen's point of view, it can contribute to the responsiveness of public policies. However, social media monitoring also poses questions in terms of transparency and privacy. This paper investigates four cases of social media monitoring by Dutch public organizations. Policy departments are more strongly orientated towards monitoring, whereas organizations involved in policy implementation seem to be more inclined to progress to webcare. The paper argues for more transparency on social media monitoring.

Using Social Media for Government Passive Expert-Sourcing

“…Subsequently, a new 'passive citizen-sourcing' approach based on social media has been developed [2,28,44]. In this approach government agencies have a less active and more passive role, aiming to exploit policy-related content that has been generated by citizens freely, without any active stimulation or direction by government, in various external (i.e.…”

Increasing Policy Success through the Use of Social Media Cross-Channels for Citizen Political Engagement

“…Where citizen-centric e-governance is defined as the use of IT for enhancing the ability of citizens to democratically engage with political discourse and decision-making and hence influence meaningful change in public policy. This recent strategic thinking has led to large-scale investments in social media technologies in government [1,4,8,19,28,29]. Similarly, net-savvy citizens across the globe also invest their resources, such as time as well as technological and political knowledge, in influencing government through digital interactions which are facilitated by various social media channels and their cross-channel information sharing mechanisms.…”

Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis in Policy Formulation Initiatives: The EU-Community Approach

“…However, gradually it was realized that the most useful political content is generated beyond the websites and social media accounts, in numerous 'external' political forums, blogs, news websites, and also in various Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts, without any stimulation from government; this gave rise to the development of a third generation of ICT based methods, which are oriented towards the automatic retrieval of this 'external' content using the APIs of the sources, and then its advanced processing (Bekkers et al, 2013; Loukis and Charalabidis, 2014; Charalabidis et al, 2014a). The above three first generations of ICT tools were oriented towards the political content generated by the general public.…”