Using Twitter for Dialogic Communication: Local Government Strategies in the European Union

Abstract

Social networks have changed the way in which governments communicate with citizens, encouraging them to participate in decision-making processes. Nevertheless, few studies have specifically addressed the use of social networks in public sector from the standpoint of dialogic communication theory. The aim of this study is, first, to analyse the extent to which European local governments are developing dialogic strategies in their Twitter profiles in order to establish and enhance relations with their citizens and then to examine the impact of certain factors on the implementation of these dialogic strategies. The findings show that the situation is open to improvement, because local governments are mostly unaware of the benefits offered by the use of dialogic principles when establishing online relationships with stakeholders. Therefore, this paper sheds light on the dialogic potential that social networks provide in public sector, and particularly, it offers a guide regarding how local government should implement Twitter to foster the dialogic communication with citizens.     

“@ me if you need shoutout”: Exploring Women's Roles in Islamic State Twitter Networks

This article investigates the social media content of women who are affiliated with the Islamic State. Throughout one year, ninety-three Twitter accounts were tracked to explore the patterns of engagement by pro–Islamic State women online and examine how these patterns illuminate the roles that pro–Islamic State women occupy on social media networks. The study reveals that women who associate with the Islamic State mostly preserve the traditional gendered role of support in the online realm. However, support is not their exclusive role and some women are active in the organization, using Twitter to recruit, promote, and even commit terrorist violence.     

Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq

Social media have played an essential role in the jihadists’ operational strategy in Syria and Iraq, and beyond. Twitter in particular has been used to drive communications over other social media platforms. Twitter streams from the insurgency may give the illusion of authenticity, as a spontaneous activity of a generation accustomed to using their cell phones for self-publication, but to what extent is access and content controlled? Over a period of three months, from January through March 2014, information was collected from the Twitter accounts of 59 Western-origin fighters known to be in Syria. Using a snowball method, the 59 starter accounts were used to collect data about the most popular accounts in the network-at-large. Social network analysis on the data collated about Twitter users in the Western Syria-based fighters points to the controlling role played by feeder accounts belonging to terrorist organizations in the insurgency zone, and by Europe-based organizational accounts associated with the banned British organization, Al Muhajiroun, and in particular the London-based preacher, Anjem Choudary.     

Engaging stakeholders on TikTok: A multi-level social media analysis of nonprofit Microvlogging

Nonprofits are slow adopters of new social media platforms, yet many have joined TikTok. Successful microvlogging on sites like TikTok, Instagram, and SnapChat requires different types of engagement than microblogging on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The authors conduct a mixed-method social media analysis to answer three questions: Do microvlogs support traditional social media functions? How are nonprofits engaging with stakeholders through microvlogging? Which function in the hierarchy of engagement framework best engages stakeholders? The authors qualitatively coded 1160 microvlogs on TikTok from 58 nonprofits. The qualitative dataset was merged with TikTok metadata to capture quantitative measures of user engagement. Findings indicate nonprofits employ community-building strategies more than information-sharing and action strategies. Users engage more often with the nonprofits' community-building microvlogs. The authors conclude that nonprofits adapt their strategy to more effectively engage stakeholders when microvlogging, which suggests there may be a “new hierarchy” of engagement for microvlogging platforms.     

A Storm on the Horizon? “Twister” and the Implications of the Blockchain and Peer-to-Peer Social Networks for Online Violent Extremism

Abstract

“Twister,” developed by Miguel Freitas, is a social network platform centered around micro-blogging, much like Twitter. However, rather than relying on centralized servers owned and maintained by a single firm, Twister users operate a blockchain combined with distributed hash table (DHT)–like and BitTorrent-like protocols to both make posts and send private messages, and also to receive entries from other users. Twister’s raison d’etre is that it offers a social networking platform that cannot be censored and cannot itself censor. The software does not record the Internet Protocol addresses users use to access the service, nor does it notify other users of an account’s online/offline status. Growing adoption of blockchain services means that it is possible that the concept of decentralized social networks could become a norm. It is suggested in this article that blockchain-based peer-to-peer social networks present challenges to the current counterextremist practices for content removal and censorship. While there are methods to disrupt usage of blockchain-based peer-to-peer services, these approaches may have the net harm of curtailing bona fide use of legal and novel technologies. Given this opportunity cost, non-transitory online violent extremist content may need to be tolerated.     

Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts

Abstract

This article contributes to public and policy debates on the value of social media disruption activity with respect to terrorist material. In particular, it explores aggressive account and content takedown, with the aim of accurately measuring this activity and its impacts. The major emphasis of the analysis is the so-called Islamic State (IS) and disruption of their online activity, but a catchall “Other Jihadi” category is also utilized for comparison purposes. Our findings challenge the notion that Twitter remains a conducive space for pro-IS accounts and communities to flourish. However, not all jihadists on Twitter are subject to the same high levels of disruption as IS, and we show that there is differential disruption taking place. IS’s and other jihadists’ online activity was never solely restricted to Twitter; it is just one node in a wider jihadist social media ecology. This is described and some preliminary analysis of disruption trends in this area supplied too.     

Local Politics Online: The Influence of Presumed Influence on Local Politicians’ Online Communication Activities in Germany

Abstract

How extensively local politicians use online media to communicate with others and the factors that influence their online activities have rarely been examined. In particular, it is unknown whether local politicians use online media more extensively when they believe that online media has a strong political influence on others. To examine this, a standardised survey among German local politicians was conducted (n = 608). The results showed the following: The stronger the politicians perceive the influence of facebook and Twitter on journalists to be, the more extensively they spread information via these social media networks. However, the presumed influences on the public or on other politicians do not affect those online activities. Thus, local politicians apparently do not pursue a disintermediation strategy – they do not try to bypass journalism by directly addressing the public. Rather, journalists seem to be an important target group for local politicians’ online communication efforts.     

East Side Story: How Transnational Coalitions Contested EU Conditionality

The literature on Europeanisation in relation to Eastern Europe has posited the material incentives of EU membership as the main driver of domestic reforms aimed at adopting EU rules and norms (conditionality). But this fails to explain puzzling instances where no EU rule exists yet domestic change happens under European influence, or where the rule is a condition yet has little impact. As repositories of (dis)information, transnational networks can embolden a candidate country to breach the rules or influence it to comply with the ‘extra-conditionality’ the networks themselves create out of their own agendas.     

Popular with the Robots: Accusation and Automation in the Argentine Presidential Elections, 2015

Accusations of dishonourable campaigning have featured in every Argentine presidential election since the return to democracy in 1983. Yet, allegations made in the elections this October and November looked different from earlier ones. The campaign team for the centre-leftist candidate Daniel Scioli argued that Cambiemos, the centre-right coalition led by Mauricio Macri, was abusing the political affordances of social media by running a Twitter campaign via ‘50,000’ fake accounts. This paper presents evidence suggesting that both teams promoted their campaigns through automation on Twitter. Although the Macri campaign was subtler, both teams appear to have used automation to the same end: maximizing the diffusion of party content and creating an inflated image of their popularity. Neither team attempted to muffle or engage with opposing voices through automation. We argue that in a political culture fixated on the appearance of popularity, the use of automation to simulate mass support appears an organic development as campaigning enters the still unregulated Twittersphere. We compare our findings to the uses of automation in the Russian Twittersphere and conclude that there may be greater variation in the political usage of Twitter between political contexts than between different types of political event occurring in the same country.     

Competition and Innovation in a Hostile Environment: How Jabhat Al-Nusra and Islamic State Moved to Twitter in 2013–2014

Abstract

Social media offer unprecedented opportunities to terrorist groups to spread their message and target specific audiences for indoctrination and recruitment. In 2013 and 2014, social media, in particular Twitter, overtook Internet forums as preferred space for jihadist propaganda. This article looks into Arabic statements by Jabhat al-Nusra, Islamic State and jihadist forum administrators and online activists to argue that, beside the easier use of social media and disruption and infiltration of the forums, the conflict between the jihadist groups accelerated the migration to social media and the building of a presence on Twitter that provided relative resilience to suspensions.     

Online as the New Frontline: Affect,Gender, and ISIS-Take-Down on Social Media

ABSTRACT

Using a dataset of more than 80 accounts during 2015, this article explores the gendered ways in which self-proclaiming Twitter Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) supporters construct community around “suspension.” The article argues that suspension is an integral event in the online lives of ISIS supporters, which is reproduced in online identities. The highly gendered roles of ISIS males and females frame responses to suspension, enforcing norms that benefit the group: the shaming of men into battle and policing of women into modesty. Both male and female members of “Wilayat Twitter” regard online as a frontline, with suspension an act of war against the “baqiya family.” The findings have implications for broader repressive measures against ISIS online.     

The Tangled Webs of Westminster and Whitehall: The Discourse, Strategy and Practice of Networking Within the British Core Executive

In this paper we identify and seek to resolve a certain paradox in the existing litera-ture on networks and networking. Whilst earlier policy network perspectives have tended to emphasize the structural character of networks as durable, dense and relatively static organization forms, the more recent strategic network literature emphasizes the flexible, adaptive and dynamic quality of networking as a social and political practice. However, neither perspective has yet developed a theory of network formation, evolution, transformation and termination. In this paper, we seek to rectify this omission, advancing a 'strategic relational' theory of network dynamics based on a rethinking of the concept of network itself. We illustrate this perspective with respect to the policy process centred in and around Westminster and Whitehall, drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with ministers and officials from four departments.     

Renovating Democracy and Salvaging Globalization

The worst fears of the American Founding fathers were realized in the 2016 presidential election when the democratic ballot box unleashed some of the darkest forces in the body politic . While it remains to be seen what his administration accomplishes , Donald Trump showed that a campaign of outright lies and invective against the world outside and perceived enemies within delivered over the latest direct access technology —Twitter—was the path to the top of the world's most powerful nation .     

Using Social Media to Increase Nonprofit Organizational Capacity

This study examines social media utilization in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) for increasing organizational capacity. Using data from a survey of human service NPOs in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the study finds that NPOs that post frequently on their social media sites and use dedicated funding are more likely to perceive social media as being effective in increasing their organizational capacity. However, NPOs that use Twitter, videos, and community-building posts are less likely to perceive social media as being effective. The study also reveals that NPOs face major challenges in social media use regarding resources, expertise, leadership and constituency.     

The Commonwealth(s)--inter- and non-state--at the start of the twenty-first century: Contributions to global development and governance

The official and unofficial Commonwealths have rarely been treated as inter- or non-state organisations, partnerships or epistemic communities contributing to global development and governance. This article seeks to rectify this oversight, especially in an emerging world 'order' characterised by unilateralism rather than multilateralism. After more than a half-century, both types of (interrelated) Commonwealth communities have emerged as invaluable, albeit second-order, adjuncts to global institutions, civil societies and private corporations. Their undramatic yet helpful characteristics as established, empathetic networks may be more needed to advance global development and governance in the new century than in recent decades, with implications for both analysis and practice, approaches and policies.     

The Impact of Metagovernance on Local Governance Networks. Lessons from Danish Employment Policy

This article analyses the impact of metagovernance on the functioning of local governance networks. It does so by comparing the functioning of four local governance networks in the field of local employment policy in Denmark. Between 2007 and 2009, two of these networks were linked to jobcentres in which the municipality and a state agency shared responsibility for employment policy, while the other two were linked to jobcentres in which the municipality had full responsibility. We explore two types of metagovernance that the local governance networks were subject to: general, hands-off metagovernance consisting of the assignment of full responsibility to the municipality alone, or of shared responsibility to the municipality and the state jointly; and tailored and fine-tuned metagovernance directed towards only one or a few networks and their corresponding jobcentre(s). Our findings suggest that, as network governance becomes a mature phenomenon, the importance of metagovernance increases, particularly for strategic reasons. More specifically, we find that the functioning of local governance networks is only marginally affected by acts of general, hands-off metagovernance, such as the different organisational set-ups ascribed to the jobcentres. More influential are the hands-on network management tools, such as direct consultancy. Hands-on metagovernance instruments, however, are more costly for the metagovernor. Whichever tool is applied, the local actors' responsiveness to metagovernance is significant for the outcome.     

'Arm's Length but Hands On'. Mapping the New Governance: The Department of National Heritage and Cultural Politics in Britain

This article uses the Department of National Heritage (DNH) founded in 1992 to illustrate the current debate over changing governance in Britain (such as the hollow core and self-steering networks) given the development of small, central policy-oriented ministries supervising a penumbra of policy networks. The article argues that the DNH has at its disposal a number of power resources – ministerial activism, policy review and guidance, systematic review, and finance – which enable it to give a determined steer to its autonomous networks. The implication of this is that real structural change should not obscure the resources at the disposal of the centre in their relationship with their policy networks: government is not just another organization.     

The Core Executive, Modernization and the Creation of PESC, 1960-64

The period between 1957 and 1964 was one of immense yet underestimated political and administrative change. It culminated in what many have seen as a golden age in Whitehall. This is reflected by the wealth of records now available for the study of government and policy networks. The period is thus an ideal one for collaboration between historians and political scientists.
The decisional case study examined in this article focuses on the early years of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee, as viewed from the perspective of welfare policy. The drive to 'modernize' government started with attempts to 'roll back the state' and to hive off the implementation of policy to executive agencies, very similar to those pursued in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher and Next Steps. The reasoned rejection of such a policy was symbolized by the creation of PESC, a centralized attempt to allocate resources rationally. PESC itself, however, was initially a failure. External circumstances, such as the breakdown of political and administrative networks within the core executive, and internal tensions, including the Treasury's covert attempt to impose its own departmental interest, led the Cabinet Secretary to conclude that the prioritization and strict control of forward expenditure commitments was 'not possible'. This case study demonstrates how future studies of the core executive might be broadened and deepened.     

Municipalities and Facebook Use: Which Key Drivers? Empirical Evidence from Italian Municipalities

New information and communication technologies are changing the relationship between municipalities and citizens. Municipalities are using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as social media to connect and interact directly with citizens. The aim of this study is to explore how municipalities use Facebook, construct a synthetic indicator to measure the use of Facebook by local government, and find out which drivers predict its diffusion through a quantitative methodology: ordinary least squares regression. A sample of Italian municipalities during 2013 is analyzed. The results suggest that the political position, the gender of the Mayor, the geographical position, the financial autonomy of municipalities, and the citizens’ wealth seem to predict the diffusion of Facebook use by municipalities.