Social Media and Government

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    Using Social Media for Government Passive Expert-Sourcing
    (2018-01-03) Loukis, Euripidis; Charalabidis, Yannis; Androutsopoulou, Aggeliki
    Social Media have been initially used by government agencies for general public oriented -˜citizen-sourcing’. Though this enabled the collection of useful policy relevant information and knowledge from the general public, and provided valuable insights into their relevant perceptions, it would be quite useful if this could be combined with the collection of policy relevant information and knowledge from experts as well (-˜expert-sourcing’). In this paper, a passive expert-sourcing method based on social media, which has been developed in a European research project, is evaluated from a fundamental perspective: the wicked problems theory perspective. In particular, we investigate to what extent this method enables government agencies to collect high quality information concerning the main elements of important social problems to be addressed through public policies: particular issues posed, alternative interventions/ actions, and advantages/disadvantages of them; as well as to what extent there is consensus about these elements among different stakeholder groups. For this purpose data are collected through interviews with Members of the Greek Parliament. From their analysis interesting conclusions have been drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this expert-sourcing method, as well as required impro-vements of it.
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    The Diffusion of Crisis-Related Communication on Social Media: An Empirical Analysis of Facebook Reactions
    (2018-01-03) Ross, Björn; Potthoff, Tobias; Majchrzak, Tim A.; Chakraborty, Narayan Ranjan; Ben Lazreg, Mehdi; Stieglitz, Stefan
    During a crisis, authorities need to effectively disseminate information. We address the problem of deciding how crisis-related information should be published on Facebook to reach as many people as possible. We examine three recent terrorist attacks in Berlin, London and Stockholm. Our specific focus lies with official Facebook pages by municipalities and emergency service agencies. We collected posts about the events, along with the number of shares, likes and emotional reactions to them. In a regression analysis, several variables were examined that capture decisions on which information to publish and how. Posts containing condolences were found to result in three times as many emotional reactions as other posts, all other variables held constant. Images and videos positively affected the number of reactions by factors of 2.2 and 3.9, respectively, while text length negatively affected the number of shares. These results will help in the development of effective guidelines.
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    Introduction to the Minitrack on Social Media and Government
    (2018-01-03) Medaglia, Rony; Scholl, Margit Christa; Loukis, Euripides