| Public engagement via social media is not treated as legitimate citizen participation. Too often, participation via social media fails to lead to informed decision-making, better public policies, or stronger service delivery. In this thesis, I detail barriers to social media legitimacy in participation, including current laws and organization behaviors. Using Arnstein's ladder of participation as a theoretical foundation, I propose a new evaluative framework for public participation -- a Social Media Participation Range. The framework offers a new evaluative tool for researchers and practitioners to analyze citizen participation via social media.;In this study, I have found that information from social media is discounted by organizations compared to information from traditional sources, whether public meetings or news sources. Public participation via social media lacks legitimacy, and many organizations use social media only in superficial and tokenistic ways. Citizens are currently not well served by opportunities to provide substantive comments about public issues and decisions via social media. In most cases, the initial discounting of information from social media is followed by a series of low impact internal organizational practices, buoyed by particular organizational beliefs, which provide a false view of the value of the information or risk posed by it. Many of the organizations studied displayed a low level of organization care toward social media and perceived social media as low risk, which leaves organizations vulnerable. In this study, I provide a framework -- Social Media Risk/Care Axis -- to help explain this phenomenon. I identify a number of public policies that should be changed to eliminate bias against social media. It calls for organizations to adapt in order to maximize the opportunities that social media presents to improve government decision making. |
