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Analyzing e-government agencies’ Twitter/X engagement: A case study of Nevada
Abstract
This research aims to investigate the dynamics of interactivity between Nevada’s e-government and its citizens through the utilization of social media, with a specific focus on Twitter. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzed how Nevada state agencies engage with the public on Twitter, while concurrently assessing citizens’ responses through qualitative empirical research. These responses were categorized into content features, encompassing subjective opinions and sentiments (positive/negative), and structural features, comprising objective elements like special characteristics and multimedia components. Content analysis was employed to explore these features, leading to the identification of seven themes within a hypothesized two-dimensional framework, encompassing both the reflection of interactivity and the transmission of interactivity.
Quantitative methods, specifically ANOVA and multiple regression analysis, were utilized to test the hypothesis. The findings revealed that Nevada e-government agencies predominantly used Twitter for one-way information dissemination, with limited two-way communication with citizens. To enhance interactivity, it is suggested that e-government posts incorporate multimedia elements and external links to facilitate information dissemination. Public administrators in the State of Nevada should focus on providing valuable and beneficial government posts, encouraging citizens to respond and express their opinions. Continuous training for public administrators is recommended, given the rapid advancements in technology and social media platforms.
Furthermore, adopting best practices from domestic and international social media companies is advised to stay innovative. Public administration should transition from merely governing individuals and information to becoming facilitators and moderators of discourse on social media platforms. State e-government can strengthen citizen interaction by consistently delivering valuable information on social media, thereby obtaining immediate feedback, and influencing public opinion.
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Website and Twitter Local Government is one government implementation to optimize public services to increase efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and government administration accountability. This paper aims to determine the quality of all city governments' websites and Twitter in West Java province, Indonesia. The research method used is descriptive interpretive by using scoring analysis techniques, namely the author gives a score for each element of the site assessment indicator based on several theories to find the weight of the score and the quality level of the website, and uses the N Vivo 12 Plus application to assess the Twitter of the city government in the province of West Java. The results showed that of all city government websites in the province of West Java, there were 4 (four) quality websites, 4 (four) websites that were of sufficient quality, and 1 (one) website was less qualified, so that the overall city government website was overall, namely 44.44% of high quality, 44.44% of sufficient quality, and 11.11% of low rate with quality status occupied by the City Government of Bandung, Bogor, Cimahi, and Cirebon; In the assessment of Twitter activity as a medium of communication and interaction with city governments throughout West Java, every city government has made efforts to fulfill public information and communication facilities as well as electronic services via Twitter. However, the implementation is less than optimal. So it is always suggested to improve the innovation and creativity of website and twitter management, monitor and evaluate and survey community satisfaction regularly to enhance the quality of the Website and Twitter of the city government.
Centralized online social networks --- e.g., Facebook, Twitter and TikTok --- help drive social connection on the Internet, but have nigh unfettered access to monitor and monetize the personal data of their users. This centralization can especially undermine the use of the social internet by minority populations, who disproportionately bear the costs of institutional surveillance. We introduce a new class of privacy-enhancing technology --- decentralized privacy overlays (DePOs) --- that helps cOSN users regain some control over their personal data by allowing them to selectively share secret content on cOSNs through decentralized content distribution networks. As a first step, we present an implementation and user evaluation of Image DePO, a proof-of-concept design probe that allows users to upload and share secret photos on Facebook through the Interplanetary File System peer-to-peer protocol. We qualitatively evaluated Image DePO in a controlled, test environment with 19 queer and Black, Indigenous, (and) Person of Color (BIPOC) participants. We found that while Image DePO could help address the institutional threats with which our participants expressed concern, interpersonal threats were the more salient concern in their decisions to share content. Accordingly, we argue that in order to see widespread use, DePOs must align protection against abstract institutional threats with protection against the more salient interpersonal threats users consider when making specific sharing decisions.
Today, our environment and the objects therein are equipped with an increasing number of devices such as cameras, sensors, and actuators, which all together produce a huge amount of data. Furthermore, we observe that citizens generate data via social media applications running on their personal devices. Smart cities and societies are seeking for ways to exploit these vast amounts of data. In this paper, we argue that to take full advantage of these data, it is necessary to set up data governance properly, which includes defining, assigning, and allocating responsibilities. A proper setting up of data governance appears to be a challenging task since the data may be used irresponsibly, thoughtlessly and maliciously, resulting in many (un)wanted side effects such as violation of rules and regulations, human rights, ethical principles as well as privacy and security requirements. We elaborate on the key functionalities that should be included in the governance of a data ecosystem within smart cites, namely provisioning the required data quality and establishing trust, as well as a few organizational aspects that are necessary to support such a data governance. Realizing these data governance functionalities, among others, asks for making trade-offs among contending values. We provide a few solution directions for realizing these data governance functionalities and making trade-offs among them.
Democratic debate has undergone a structural transformation due to the rise of the Internet, social media and online communities. Scholars of political communication have sought to diagnose the threat that these changes pose by theorising “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Responding to a growing desire on the part of policymakers to react to these trends and to uphold democratic values, we draw on empirical analyses of online discourse to consider the difficulties involved in this endeavour. Highlighting the diversity of trends detected by empirical studies of the digital public sphere, we argue that both political theory and empirical analysis are needed to promote democratic ideals. Using Jürgen Habermas’s “coffeehouse model,” we establish theoretical markers for desirable deliberative practice and consider the conditions under which these ideals can be advanced. By focusing on the significance of both digital design and user behaviour, we suggest initiatives that can promote favoured democratic ideals.
Trust is an essential determinant that encourages citizens' behavior to use e-government services. However, despite its importance there is little evidence of research to investigate citizens' trust in e-government services, particularly in context of using social media as a technology platform for e-government services. The objective of this paper is to investigate antecedents of trust to use social media for e-government services from multiple dimensions. A systematic literature review was conducted from published articles between 2007 to 2017 with a relevant discussion on citizen's trust aspects towards e-government services. As a result, 35 articles were selected from 7 electronic databases after an intensive systematic literature review process of searching and using an inclusion and exclusion criteria to extract relevant articles meeting the objective of this study. The findings from the analysis of this review reveal that trust has been mostly discussed in literature as a single component of e-government adoption factors rather than being studied independently. In addition, trust generating factors in context of using social media for e-government services have not received much attention in previous studies. To address this research gap, this study proposes a model that identifies antecedents of trust from multiple dimensions which are classified as individual characteristics, government factors, risk factors and social media characteristics. This study contributes to present a new paradigm for developing citizens' trust to increase their participation in social media-based services of e-government and also highlights directions for future research.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue about generation of public value through smart technologies and strategies. The key argument is that smart technologies have the potential to foster co-creation of public services and the generation of public value in management processes, based on the collaborative, social and horizontal nature of these smart technologies. Understanding these processes from a public management perspective is the purpose of this paper and the rest of the special issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach to this paper is a theoretical and conceptual review, whereas practical implications both for scholars and practitioners arise from the review of the literature and the conceptual approximation to the notion of smartness in technologies and government. This approach is rooted in the potential of the latest smart technologies and strategies to transform public administrations and to better understand and cope societal problems.
Findings
The conceptual and theoretical perspective of this paper offers ideas for future developments. The content of this paper shows that new smart technologies and strategies will shape, and will be shaped by, the future of public organizations and management. This paper illustrates the process of change in public value generation over time, as a result of different public management paradigms (from traditional public administration to new public management), but also different types of technologies (from mainframes to websites and social media and beyond). The empirical evidence of the articles of this special issue supports this conclusion; that open and collaborative innovation processes developed under this emergent technological wave could become encouraging transformative practices in the public sector.
Research limitations/implications
The theoretical and conceptual nature of this paper needs further empirical research to validate some of the discussed assumptions and ideas.
Originality/value
Although this paper is oriented to present the main contents of the special issue, it also provides an original approach to the theme of public value generation using smart technologies and strategies in public sector management.
E-government aims to enhance the interaction between citizens, business, and government. Recently, the term open government is increasingly used to emphasize the importance of co-creation in governmental issues. In this study, the social media activities of the municipalities of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, are investigated with regard to the topic “open government” as one pillar of e-government. The findings show that user interaction is mostly represented through likes and shares and rarely by comments. A topic detection of the posted content reveals that different terms are covered by the municipalities and shows that open government is getting more and more diverse in recent years. The number of posts is still increasing each year on the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, but the topic of open government is still a peripheral phenomenon.
The social media are becoming a major channel of online interactive participation, and local governments are seizing this opportunity to enhance citizen engagement in political and social affairs. This article analyses the various forms of social media used – that is, Twitter or Facebook – by citizens in their relations with Spanish local government, to determine which of these achieves the strongest degree of commitment. We also analyse the influence of various factors on this level of commitment. The results obtained show that Facebook is preferred to Twitter as a means of participating in local government issues. Other factors that are relevant to citizen engagement are the level of online transparency, mood, the level of activity in social media and the interactivity offered by the local government website. The findings of this study contribute significantly to understanding how citizen engagement is influenced by the type of social media adopted.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore how to use social media in e-government to strengthen interactivity between government and the general public.
Design/methodology/approach
– Categorizing the determinants to interactivity covering depth and breadth into two aspects that are the structural features and the content features, this study employs general linear model and ANOVA method to analyse 14,910 posts belonged to the top list of the 96 most popular government accounts of Sina, one of the largest social media platforms in China.
Findings
– The main findings of the research are that both variables of the ratio of multimedia elements, and the ratio of external links have positive effects on the breadth of interactivity, while the ratio of multimedia features, and the ratio of originality have significant effects on the depth of interactivity.
Originality/value
– The contributions are as follows. First, the authors analyse the properties and the topics of government posts to draw a rich picture of how local governments use the micro-blog as a communications channel to interact with the public. Second, the authors conceptualize the government online interactivity in terms of the breadth and depth. Third, the authors identify factors that will enhance the interactivity from two aspects: structural features and content features. Lastly, the authors offer suggestions to local governments on how to strengthen the e-government interactivity in social media.
The research determines the status of counties? e-government in three dimensions and the factors influencing their success, based on a combination of a county e-government survey and a content analysis of their websites. Despite the technological growth among county governments, the existing studies have little information dealing specifically with local county governments? use of e-government technology. This research synthesizes the various existing models of e-government to develop a conceptual framework of three distinct e-government dimensions?e-information, e-transaction, and e-participation. The dimension of e-information refers to the provision of relevant and sufficient information through effective communication, thus leading to an informed citizenry; e-transaction involves efficient and effective transactions that result from an integrated citizenry; and e-participation refers to the promotion of an electronic democracy that involves a participatory citizenry. The study produces some significant findings and provides directions for future research in county e-government.
The use of social media applications has been widely accepted in the U.S. government. Many of the social media strategies and day-to-day tactics have also been adopted around the world as part of local Open Government Initiatives and the worldwide Open Government Partnership. Nevertheless, the acceptance and broader adoption of sophisticated tactics that go beyond information and education paradigm such as true engagement or networking strategies are still in its infancy. Rapid diffusion is challenged by informal bottom-up experimentation that meets institutional and organizational challenges hindering innovative tactics. Going forward governments and bureaucratic organizations are also facing the challenge to show the impact of their social media interactions. Each of these challenges is discussed in this article and extraordinary examples, that are not widely adopted yet, are provided to show how government organizations can potentially overcome these challenges.
Public administration theory and practice suggest that e-government, citizen participation, and government—citizen collaboration are contributing to a movement toward New Public Service—as opposed to Old Public Administration and New Public Management. We explore this by focusing on the relationship between the Washington, D.C., police and local residents via online discussion groups. We ask, How do police interact with citizens virtually? How are these interactions structured? and Are they informational, transactional, or collaborative? Using descriptive data and thread analysis, and drawing distinctions between districts, we conclude that the bulk of activity is informational, a fair amount of activity is transactional, and less activity is collaborative. Thus, the relationship most closely approximates Old Public Administration, rather than New Public Management or New Public Service. The evidence offers some cause for hope for the future of police—community relations in virtual space and ideas for future research.
This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one's ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N=286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.
Government 2.0–or the use of social media in the public sector–has become a hot topic. Agencies and departments on all levels of government are adding Facebook, Twitter or YouTube buttons to their otherwise static–infrequently updated–websites. It is still not clear how successful and useful social media is in the public sector and how agencies can design their own social media strategies.
E-government services are important aspects of today's wellbeing of citizens. The adoption of technology is explored utilizing many theories and predictors. The theory of reasoned action (TRA) proposes that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and subjective norms are significant predictors of behavioral intentions. This study extended the theory with trust, and hypothesized that demographic factors (gender, age, education, and experience) are significant moderators of the relationships assumed in the research model. Responses from 699 Jordanians fully supported the suggested research model, where BI to use e-government services was significantly predicted by all proposed variables. All four demographic factors failed to be significant predictors of BI, and only two relationships were moderated by age and education. In addition, an ANOVA test concluded that means differences existed within categories of sample based on specific variables of the model. The complete results and findings and conclusions are deliberated at the end of this chapter.
This study investigates predictors of Twitter adoption and use by municipalities for citizen communication, considering both the level of municipal Twitter presence and the level of Twitter activity. Possible predictors included municipal characteristics as well as citizenry characteristics. Participants included 100 Pennsylvania municipalities drawn from a disproportionate stratified sample, evenly split between municipalities with and without a Twitter presence. No significant correlation was found between the level of municipal Twitter presence and active use of Twitter. Regression results suggest that the likelihood of adopting a Twitter account increases with greater population size and a younger population, though only population size significantly predicts the number of Twitter accounts. Regression results also suggest that a greater population size, lesser median citizen income, and a higher number of county-level Twitter accounts influence the level of Twitter activity among these municipalities.
This paper provides a general overview of the way local governments use Twitter as a communication tool to engage with their citizens. More concretely, it tries to identify factors associated with both the channel activity and citizen engagement, to understand the relationship between media type and citizen engagement and to analyse whether different content generated different levels of engagement. A sample of the 29 most populated Andalusian local governments is examined. The results show that the majority of Andalusian local governments have an official corporate Twitter account with certain level of activity. There is no, however, a significant relationship between the population of a municipality and its citizen's engagement, and there is a significant negative relationship between audience and engagement and between activity and engagement. The findings of the study also show the particular media and content types generate higher engagement than others. This paper contributes to the literature on social media and has practical implications for local governments.
As the world moves towards an information society, it is not possible to consider the concept of e-Government that is restricted to the ability of just a few. At present, it is common to have to fill out forms electronically in order to carry out administrative procedures. The web interfaces of public transactional e-Services must be accessible by system users, regardless of whether they are disabled or not, according to the regulatory framework. This accessibility is not always taken into consideration in online forms in a process flow. One possible reason for this is the fact that guides are not available to assist in the design and evaluation of their accessibility. It is necessary for the transactional processes on Government e-Service websites to be accessible and well designed, in accordance with the current standards. In order to achieve this goal, the standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) must be complied with, according to legislation. However, these guidelines do not cover many of the obstacles faced by people with disabilities, as well as the general public, while filling out web forms, thus leaving accessibility problems undetected and unsolved. For this reason, web accessibility standards are not enough and should be supplemented by official government design patterns focused on transactional e-Services and online forms. In this article, we propose a support resource, which includes the accessibility criteria to be followed while designing and evaluating government transactional e-Service websites that incorporate online forms in the process flow. For the purpose of evaluating the reliability of the method and explaining it, a study was carried out on a sample of Spanish government e-Services used for making appointments in order to detect accessibility and design problems; this is presented as an example of good practices.
Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989b; 1962) is an immensely rich and influential book that has had a major impact in a variety of disciplines. It has also received detailed critique and generated extremely productive discussions of liberal democracy, civil society, public life, social changes in the twentieth century, and other issues. Few books of the second half of the twentieth century have been so seriously discussed in so many different fields and continue, more than 50 years after its initial publication in 1962, to create controversy and insight.
Governments are adopting social media to provide complementary information dissemination, communication, and participation channels whereby citizens can access government and government officials and make informed decisions. Using 2009 national e-government survey data from the Pew Research Center, this study finds (1) that use of government social media is significantly and positively associated with perceptions of government transparency, (2) that perceptions of government transparency are positively and significantly related to trust in government, and (3) that perceptions of government transparency mediate the relationship between use of government social media and trust in government. These findings demonstrate that social media is an effective means for government to improve citizens’ trust in government by enhancing their perceptions of government transparency. The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the mediating role of perceived government transparency in linking the use of e-government to trust in government.
Previous research incorporates Habermas’ theory of communicative action with implications of social media for public discourse, yet few studies consider the theory’s relevance and applicability to public administrators. This article addresses this weak link by focusing on the administration legitimacy dilemma. While social media can be useful to public administrators facilitating collaborative interactions with citizens, these platforms are not automatically suited to public participation in governance. Habermas’ theory offers a framework for understanding these possibilities and challenges, as well as adapting social media constructively to administrative practice.
As governments across the world have decreased in perceived reliability and trust, they now need more stable and continuous tools to communicate with their citizens. In this context, many government agencies are attempting to use social media tools to communicate with the public and promote citizen’s trust. But, few studies have investigated the critical factors and antecedents of trust in government under social media context. Thus, this study empirically analyzes the antecedents and formation of citizen trust and expansion in actual citizen patronage behavior deploying structural equation model. The survey data was obtained from Korean population who used government’s social media service. The results indicate that the formation of citizen trust in the government can be expanded into patronage intention toward social media and actual behavior. This study also demonstrates that factors related institutional-based trust, characteristic-based trust, and process based trust contribute to improving trust through government social media services. This study provides contribution as research that discovers the antecedents of trust in government social media use and it employs integrated perspective for the structural components of trust simultaneously.
This paper examines the extent to which state governments in the United States have adopted open e-government initiatives. The adoption is examined in terms of the three pillars of open government identified by President Obama's administration: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of state governments were surveyed to identify the extent of the adoption. The paper highlights that open e-government initiatives are unevenly developed. Nearly two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed felt that they have achieved high levels of open e-government, but fewer CIOs felt similarly with respect to each of the pillars of open government. Whereas a majority of the CIOs deemed good strides in the achievement of transparency, they were less sanguine about achieving advanced methods in citizen participation or collaboration among agencies.
Building on the Competing Values Framework (CVF), we investigated the relationship between organizational culture and performance.
The perspective of consistency and that of balance were applied to examine the relationship. We tested our hypotheses on a
sample of 270 companies in China, which resulted in two major findings. First, the consistency between organizational culture
and external environment was found positively associated with organizational performance. Consistency was operationalized
as a match between an organization’s current culture and its preferred future culture. Second, balance of organizational culture
was found positively correlate with organizational performance. A balanced culture was defined as one in which values of each
of the CVF culture types are equally held.
在竞争价值观框架的基础上, 研究企业文化与企业绩效关系, 发现: 首先, 企业文化与内外部环境之间一致性越好, 即现状文化和目标文化一致性越好, 企业的人力资源开发水平和财务绩效都会越好: 其次, 对于成立时间较长的企业来说, 企业文化越是均衡发展,
即现状文化在四种类型的分布上越趋于均匀一致, 企业的人力资源开发水平会越好。
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- E N Fretwell
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- J Habermas
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On the use of multimedia in Twitter health communication: Analysis of posts regarding the Zika virus
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- L Hagen
- J Andrews
- R Scharf
- T Keller
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- J E Song