Knowing the past to write the future: risks and challenges related with social media governance in government
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/DPRG-10-2021-0124 |
| Published date | 31 May 2022 |
| Date | 31 May 2022 |
| Pages | 337-354 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information policy |
| Author | Victor W. Bohorquez-Lopez |
Knowing the past to write the future: risks
and challenges related with social media
governance in government
Victor W. Bohorquez-Lopez
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this study is to identify the mostfrequent themes related with social media
governance in government by year, analyzing if these themes have evolved over time, as well as
highlightingthe main risks and challenges found as furtherresearch opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach –First, the authors have extracted 431 abstracts from Scopus dat abase.
Then, abstracts were grouped by year to apply topic modeling to discover the un derlying topics. Specifically,
the authors have applied latent Dirichlet allocatio n algorithm to identify the most frequent topics by year.
Findings –The results reveal 19 important topics related with social media governan ce in government. Then,
these topics were assigned to each year to identify the evolution of th e research themes over the years,
proposing interesting avenues for further research based on the ident ification of the main risks and challenges.
Practical implications –The proposed research methodology can be applied not only for research
purposes but alsoto discover themes in any discourse with applicationsin politics, marketing, business,
etc. In addition, it can be used to save time and costsanalyzing citizen comments in public debates to
identifythe most important topics.
Originality/value –This study can serve to highlight gaps in the literature, opening the possibility that
researchers can adequatelyposition their inquiries, as well as to be awareof overstudied themes to pay
less attentionto them in future projects. In addition, the results of this studycould serve as a starting point
for other researchers to analyze connections between topics, propose theories that explain what was
found andvalidate them in future studies.
Keywords Risks and challenges, Social media, Governance, Government, Topic modeling
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Social media is a phenomenonthat was enhanced due to the proliferation of social networks
and the massive penetration of smartphones with internet access, allowing the evolution of
this communication channel from unidirectional to bidirectional, enabling people to interact
with each other, which has radically changed the “status quo” not only at social and
business level but also at politicaland public level. The growth of interest in the use of social
media governance in government is reflected in need to understand the process and
outcomes of government–citizen interactions (Aladwani and Dwivedi, 2018) and in the
growth of Scopus publications in journals and in international conferences. If we consider
that the first article that uses these keywords was found in 2008, we can clearly see that the
trend is growing since 63 articles on the subjecthave been published so far in 2020.
Traditionally, lack of public participation in government used to be one of the major
concerns when formulating and evaluating public policies (Singh et al., 2020); in this
context, social media has become an important channel of online interactive participation,
and governments are using this channel to enhance citizen engagement in political and
Victor W. Bohorquez-Lopez
is based at the Business
School, Pontificia
Universidad Cat
olica
Madre y Maestra,
Santo Domingo, Dominican
Republic.
JEL classification –D83, O38
Received 5 October 2021
Revised 22 March 2022
Accepted 5 May 2022
DOI 10.1108/DPRG-10-2021-0124 VOL. 24 NO. 4 2022, pp. 337-354, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2398-5038 jDIGITAL POLICY, REGULATION AND GOVERNANCE jPAGE 337
social affairs (Haro-de-Rosario et al., 2018). Therefore, social media is one of the major
trends in e-government research and practice worldwide, especially due to its potential for
the innovation of public organizations (Criado et al.,2013). Government, as well as different
public institutions, are using social media to connect with citizens and other stakeholders;
however, this situation introduces risks and challenges in governance (Bertot et al., 2012)
that have evolved over time and should be analyzedand understood.
Over the years, different authors have dealt with the issue from different approaches, using
varied methodologies, and each one highlighting their own perspectives related with social
media governance in government. In this scenario, it is essential to understand the past,
analyzing how the terms used have changed,identifying the most relevant issues today and
those that have not been widely covered, to take advantage of the gaps inthe literature and
propose the themes to be discussed in the coming years. Based on the above, the
following questions are proposed: what are the most frequent themes related to social
media governance in government by year?Have these themes changed in importance over
the years? Can we identify some issues that have not been sufficiently analyzed? What are
the main risks and opportunitiesthat we can find in the whole analyzed literature?
To address such questions, this article will review the growing literature on the subject from
its origin in 2008 until July 2021, with a focus on articles indexed in Scopus related with
social media governance in government. The main challenge when conducting literature
reviews on a theme is the large number of publications that need to be analyzed (Upreti
et al., 2016). Moro et al. (2019) argue that in recent years several techniques have been
developed to extract knowledge from different text sources using text mining procedures,
and one of the most common techniques is topic modeling, which uses statistical machine
learning to extract unsupervised sets of terms with a coherent meaning (called topics) from
the document corpus, automatically grouping those terms in which there are more
presumable semantic links betweenthem (Rossetti et al., 2016).
Topic modeling allows a large amount of textual data to be quantitatively analyzed and has
been successfully applied in literature reviews in other fields (Upreti et al.,2016). As an
unsupervised model, it does not require previous annotations or documents labeled since
all the topics arise naturally from thedata’s statistical structure of the documents and words
analyzed (Sun and Yin, 2017). Within topic modeling, it is used the latent Dirichlet allocation
(LDA) algorithm, which is one of the most popular and has applications in various types of
problems (Amado et al.,2018), especially because it has a modeling structure that can be
interpreted in an intuitive way (Ingrams, 2020). This algorithm serves to identify the hidden
knowledge within textual sources, especially when the analyzed documents deal with
multiple topics, common characteristic of academic articles because they integrate various
research lines, which is needed for a deeper understanding of the analyzed issues from a
holistic perspective.
This paper has the following structure. Section 2 includes a literature review with the main
used definitions. Section 3 reportsthe research methodology and the process to obtain and
refine the data. Section 4 presents the main findings after applying LDA algorithm to
the analyzed articles. With these results, Section 5 has a deep discussion to answer
the proposed research questions. Finally, Section 6 shows the conclusion highlighting the
article contribution as well as severalpaths for further work.
2. Literature review
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as internet-based applications built on
the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, that is, moving from one-way
communication to a much more interactive communication. Beyond the great growth of
social media, it is clear that few organizations use them properly because they lack
adequate structures, cultures and strategies for this new way of online communication
PAGE 338 jDIGITAL POLICY, REGULATION AND GOVERNANCE jVOL. 24 NO. 4 2022
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