Introduction to the Special Issue on Government and Social Media

The rise of social media offers governments at different levels and localities access to a variety of platforms and tools for public administration and for interaction with citizens and constituent organizations. Social media also support and facilitate citizens’ and organizations’ interactions with each other in efforts to share information and communicate about issues of interest, collective problem solving, and democratic governance. Studies of the use and impact of social media are part of the area of computing research known as social computing; that is, the intersection of social behavior (e.g., political science, psychology, communication, sociology, economics) and computational systems and software (e.g., computer science). The study of government, public administration, democracy, and technology is rooted in these disciplines. The benefits of the communication technology of social media derive from their affordances for direct communication, empowerment, and crowdsourcing among users in response to routines of daily life, as well as to big challenges, such as long-term municipal planning, regional and global environmental crises, and social change. By means of social media, channels such as micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter), social network sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), and other user-generated content and mark-up tools, governments, citizens, businesses, and voluntary associations share information, ask questions, and compete or collaborate on problem-solving within and among neighborhoods, industries, states, and nations. Social media are used, among other channels, to broadcast information, promote perspectives and policies, and to garner (or sometimes disrupt) support for collective action. The staggering number and diversity of messages and topics generated by users make it difficult for all entities—government, organizations, citizens—to process and make sense of vast amounts of disparate and unstructured information, images, and sentiments, especially for non-technical users. Analyses of communication behavior (such as information sharing), trends, and message content by all parties should help contribute to our knowledge of the ways the use of social media are affecting collective problem-solving, public administration, and social structures. Empirical research of actual use of social media contributes to our understanding of the challenges and benefits of social media use in the public domain. In their article titled “MPs on FB: Differences between members of coalition and opposition,” authors Nili Steinfeld and Azi Lev-On analyze the content of the Facebook (FB) pages of all members of the 19 Israeli Parliament or Knesset (2013-15). They find differences in communication behavior between coalition and opposition MPs on multiple measures, including: scope of publication, scope of user engagement, content, and format. Authors Loni Hagen, Stephen Neely, Ryan Scharf, and Thomas Keller examine the use of Twitter for crisis communications in their article “Government Social Media Communications during Zika Health Crisis: An Analysis of Federal, State, and Local Level Governments.” The authors focus on public actors’ use of Twitter