Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson
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are concerned primarily with the impact of social media on civic engagement. Although bulletin boards and other community-oriented media have been around for a while, social media as we know it today began at the start of the 21st century. The earliest pure social networking sites—Friendster, LinkedIn, and MySpace—were launched in 2002–2003. The first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005. Twitter was started in 2006. Facebook opened to a non-restrictive membership also in 2006. Other rapidly growing social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, and Snapchat are even younger.
A definitional part of the concept of Web 2.0, social media includes computing platforms that allow users to interact with each other, to share and augment media content such as news articles, and to post, comment on, and respond to media of all kinds, including text, images, video, and music. A critical feature of social media is that it is a prosumer environment, involving all participants in both the production and consumption aspects of its use (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Thus, the content of social media is largely user-generated, although users now post journalistic media, news, and other professionally produced material as well, and social media platforms have evolved a much more seamless integration of these different types of materials. Similarly, while there are different platforms for different media types—Instagram for pictures and YouTube for videos, for example—social media sites are also now moving to integration of material across platforms and are also supporting multiple media types within their own environments. The typical newsfeed on Facebook, by far the most popular social media environment, will contain text posts from friends and friends-of-friends; pictures from friends and acquaintances; embedded videos from friends, organizations, and professional sources; embedded news and magazine stories from multiple sources; jokes and memes from friends and organizations; updates on travel; targeted advertising; links and reposts from microblogs like Twitter or image platforms like Instagram; and so on.
All of these features may be reacted to instantly with a range of emotional expressions and may be commented on in a threaded comment section with text or any other content of the types mentioned above. In other words, these environments have become complex, multifaceted, multimedia, multisource information firehoses that mix social, commercial, civic, and other matters mercilessly. They are accessible at any time through mobile devices and visited multiple times per day by literally billions of users.
Social media can be a stand-alone environment or platform in which users maintain a friend, acquaintance, and/or follower network, and typically intermingle content sharing and information dissemination activities in multiple spheres (e.g., entertainment, politics, news, etc.). Social media can also be an added feature to other application environments, for example as a commenting area on news stories or videos, or as a Twitter feed embedded in a web application. Seamless integration of social networking applications with content-supplying applications has been achieved by many popular platforms. Many traditional online media outlets provide liking and sharing buttons that instantly move content into a social media stream where it can be immediately viewed by friends and followers, embellished, and rebroadcast throughout the network. Most recently, traditional news outlets such as the New York Times have entered into deals to integrate their content directly into social media feeds without the need for sharing. This widespread integration of social media functions within other applications, in conjunction with the fact that many users maintain an open, background social media application while doing other things on the internet, makes it difficult to assess exactly when internet users are engaged in social media activity, or more accurately it makes it difficult to assess when they are not engaged in social media activity. In fact, it is probably best to assume that for many internet users social networking is a constant state, either potential or realized.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has been tracking multiple aspects of the use of social media since its inception. Sixty-five percent of American adults now use social networking sites (Perrin, 2015). The highest usage is by younger people in the age range of 18–29 (90%), although other age groups also report moderate to high usage (77% of 30–49 year olds, 51% of 50–64 year olds, 35% of people over 65 years of age), and of course the growth rate is dramatic. Women use social networking sites slightly more than men (women = 68%, men = 62%). More highly educated individuals with higher household incomes are greater users of social media, however no educational or income group falls under 50% usage of social networking platforms anymore. Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan (2016) report extremely high use of multiple social media sites among online Americans, with Facebook leading the pack at a usage rate of 79% of all online Americans. Instagram, Pintrest, LinkedIn, and Twitter follow with usage rates of 32%, 31%, 29%, and 24% respectively. Three-quarters of Facebook users visit the site every day, and half of them visit it multiple times per day. More than half of social media users visit multiple sites.
The advent of social media was a game changer for community computing. Suddenly, community activities that designers had been trying to support in various civic computing environments were available for appropriation in a handful of popular social networking sites. Many community, civic, and even governmental interactive functions are now accomplished via integrated social media sites.
Social media platforms have been implicated in a variety of political movements such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. (Caren and Gaby, 2011); the 2010–2012 Arab-Spring related uprisings throughout the Middle East including Tunisia (Kavanaugh et al., 2016; Wulf et al., 2013b), spreading to Egypt (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011; Lim, 2012; Tufeckci and Wilson, 2012) and Turkey (Dincelli, Hong, and DePaula, 2016); Karkin et al., 2015; Varol et al., 2014), and elsewhere (Howard and Hussain, 2011); occupied West Bank villages (Wulf et al., 2013a); and other significant populist movements globally (Shirky, 2011). They have played increasingly important roles in elections in mature democracies (Vitak et al., 2011), and are playing significant roles in connecting citizens to each other and to their governments in many emerging democracies (Morozov, 2009). Social media is used increasingly as an important part of digital government initiatives throughout the world. Barak Obama established the @POTUS Twitter tag in early 2015 and became the first sitting American president to join the Facebook social network later that same year. Manipulation of social media to influence elections is one of the biggest stories of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and as of this writing (2018), a newly elected president Donald Trump is blazing a trail as an everyday user of the Twitter microblogging site (@realDonaldTrump) to express thoughts, emotions, and reactions that seem spontaneous and un-vetted.
In addition to direct use for the activities of civic engagement, social media now plays an important role in news dissemination, and hence in information gathering relevant to political action and political opinion. Sixty-two percent of American adults get news from social media sources (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016). Again, the role of news varies considerably depending on the social media site in question. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter provide the greatest opportunities for exposure to news and information within their platforms, with 70% of Reddit users, 66% of Facebook users, and 59% of Twitter users reporting that they get news from these respective platforms. Thirty-one percent of Tumblr users report getting news from that site. Other sites fall well under 25%. The dominance of Facebook as a social media platform, combined with its large role as a source of news, make it the primary social media source of news for American adults (Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan, 2016). In earlier reports, a little more than one third (36%) of social networking site users say that these platforms are important for keeping up with political news in particular (Raine and Smith, 2012). Again, at the current time (2018), the organized creation and dissemination of “fake news” to influence political opinion is under increased scrutiny.
Research on the use of social media by citizens to interact with government has focused on three modes of information dissemination: one-way push, two-way pull, and networking (Meijer and Thaens, 2013; Mergel, 2013a). Despite the advent of social media, research to date has shown that government use of social media is largely one-way, with many local governments still using a “push” model in which information flows from the government to the citizen (Mergel, 2013b; Mossberger, Wu, and Crawford, 2013). DePaula and Dincelli (2016) characterized Facebook posts of municipal-level government agencies in the U.S. to be mainly push oriented (policy announcements and public service announcements), secondarily impression management oriented (marketing, political positioning, positive imagery and favorable publicity), in small