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

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Abstract

Social media monitoring is gradually becoming a common practice in public organizations in the Netherlands. The main purposes of social media monitoring are strategic control and responsiveness. Social media monitoring poses normative questions in terms of transparency, accountability and privacy. We investigate practices of social media monitoring in four Dutch public organizations. Policy departments seem to be 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.

Introduction

Social media are rapidly penetrating the modern information society. This new generation of applications emphasizes the importance of user-participation, content-sharing, and network effects (e.g., O'Reilly, 2007). They facilitate a scale shift that makes the organization of collective action, with large numbers of participants, more efficient (Chadwick, 2009). The political potential of social media poses several challenges for public organizations. Strategic surprises may emerge from the rapid expansion of issues and ad hoc synchronization of messages in web-based protest politics (Bekkers et al., 2011, Shirky, 2011).

Public organizations may perceive a need for strategies to cope with these surprises. These strategies include monitoring citizens' communication and content-sharing on social media (cf. Sobkowicz, Kaschesky, & Bouchard, 2012). This paper addresses the practice of web monitoring or, more specifically, social media monitoring by public organizations in the context of Western democracies. Social media monitoring is “the continuous systematic observation and analysis of social media networks and social communities” (Fensel, Leiter, & Stavrakantonakis, 2012). In the Netherlands, social media monitoring is gradually becoming a common practice in public organizations, especially in national departments and autonomous agencies.

In terms of public values, social media monitoring entails some tensions. On the one hand, it can facilitate the tuning of policies to citizens' needs and demands, and this may result in more responsiveness. On the other hand, social media monitoring involves communication between ordinary citizens in virtual domains that they may perceive as private. This poses ethical questions, especially when the monitoring agency is not transparent regarding its monitoring activities vis-à-vis social media users. Our central research question is how public organizations use social media monitoring, for what purposes, and how they deal with aspects regarding responsiveness, privacy, and transparency. This paper aims to contribute to the intended scope of the special issue by highlighting government use of information from social media applications, how governmental agencies use these data from citizens to improve public policies, as well as how various goals and normative principles are involved in this. The empirical part of the paper addresses emerging practices of social media monitoring in four national public organizations in the Netherlands. Section 2 introduces web monitoring and social media monitoring, indicating the origins of these practices in the private sector. Section 3 presents three theoretical approaches to social media monitoring and introduces a normative framework for evaluating social media monitoring. Section 4 presents the research strategy and the analytical framework. Section 5 analyzes the four selected cases. Section 6 concludes and provides further reflections on this new phenomenon of social media monitoring by public organizations.

Section snippets

Web monitoring and social media monitoring

Monitoring activities have become a strong tradition within the public sector (Bouckaert et al., 2003, de Kool, 2007, de Kool, 2008). Traditional monitoring involves signalizing relevant developments in the physical environment, for example in the domains of safety, education, and environmental policies. The rapid increase in the internet and social media usage by citizens, security threats, and the possibility of strategic surprises have induced governments to develop various online monitoring

Three approaches to social media monitoring

Monitoring is often approached as a rational instrument for gathering information. However, a rational–instrumental approach is too narrow with respect to understanding the complex character of monitoring and the policy processes in which it is embedded. A multiple perspective approach offers a better understanding of monitoring than a single rational perspective. For this reason, we make a distinction between three approaches to social media monitoring, namely, a rational–instrumental, a

Research strategy

The research strategy is based on a multiple case study approach. A case study recognizes the complex nature of social phenomena in a coherent and integrated way, thereby acknowledging the complex and meaningful interaction between relevant social processes and actors instead of limiting the study of social phenomena to a very specified set of variables and the relations between them (Yin, 2003). We have selected four cases. Two cases concern social media monitoring in the context of

The secondary school students' revolt (2007)

The introduction of major reforms in primary and secondary education during the last decade caused the quality of education to be a widely discussed issue in the Netherlands. In 2007, discussion focused on one particular issue: the government's enforcement of the 1040-hour norm. This norm refers to the total number of teaching hours that students are required to follow each year during the first and second years of secondary education. Many schools were unable to comply with this norm because

Conclusions

The cases suggest that among public organizations in the Netherlands social media monitoring is gaining a fully-fledged position alongside the more traditional ways of gauging sentiments and views among target groups and clients. We first summarize the most important results of our analysis.

For both ministries and the tax agency, the main goal of social media monitoring is to gain a better insight into the relevant sentiments within their target groups. Instrumental and strategic orientations

Victor Bekkers (Prof.dr.) is professor of public administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is responsible for the research program ‘Lost connections, linking capacities: on the effectiveness, legitimacy and self-organization of public administration practices’. His main interests are focused on the relationship between governance and ICT, virtual organizations in the public sector, ICT integration in policy networks and policy chains, innovation and electronic government. He has

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    Victor Bekkers (Prof.dr.) is professor of public administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is responsible for the research program ‘Lost connections, linking capacities: on the effectiveness, legitimacy and self-organization of public administration practices’. His main interests are focused on the relationship between governance and ICT, virtual organizations in the public sector, ICT integration in policy networks and policy chains, innovation and electronic government. He has published numerous journal articles and contributions to national and English books, for instance in the International Review of Administrative Sciences, Information Infrastructure and Policy, Information Polity, and Public Management Review.

    Arthur Edwards (Dr.) is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research is focused on democratic practices, in particular those facilitated by new media (‘e-democracy’ and ‘e-participation’). He co-edited the book Governance and the Democratic Deficit (with V. Bekkers, G. Dijkstra and M. Fenger, Ashgate, 2007). His recent publications include journal articles and book chapters about various aspects of e-democracy and social media in politics.

    Dennis de Kool (Dr.) is a full time researcher at the Center for Public Innovation at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He received his PhD degree in 2007 with a dissertation on monitors in the public sector. He is involved in research projects about various aspects of e-governance.

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