Tips, Tidings, and Tech: Governmental Communication on Facebook during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic led governments to rely on the versatility of social media to communicate with their citizens. This paper analyzes the Facebook communication of political leaders and health departments from 17 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluate the citizen's response under the frameworks of media richness and user engagement. We note that governments and leaders communicate primarily through richer media (photos and videos), despite a negative correlation between media richness and user engagement. Plain-Text messages posted by country leaders attract the most engagement, while their COVID-19 communication tends to generate lower engagement. On the other hand, health departments' pages experienced a sharp increase in engagement around COVID-19 communication as citizens sought information during the pandemic. Finally, topical analysis shows that Discussions and Co-Use of COVID-19 with other topics can boost citizens' engagement. Our comparative analysis shows practical implications for social media users and social media designers. Our findings can help governments and organizations design effective social media communication during crises. © 2022 ACM.

A Systematic Approach for Contextualizing Focal Structure Analysis in Social Networks

Focal Structures are key sets of individuals who may be responsible for coordinating events, protests, or leading citizen engagement efforts on social media networks. Discovering focal structures that can promote online social campaigns is important but complex. Unlike influential individuals, focal structures can effect large-scale complex social processes. In our prior work, we applied a greedy algorithm and bi-level decomposition optimization solution to identify focal structures in social media networks. However, the outcomes lacked a contextual representation of the focal structures that affected interpretability. In this research, we present a novel Contextual Focal Structure Analysis (CFSA) model to enhance the discovery and the interpretability of the focal structures to provide the context in terms of the content shared by individuals in the focal structures through their communication network. The CFSA model utilizes multiplex networks, where the first layer is the users-users network based on mentions, replies, friends, and followers, and the second layer is the hashtag co-occurrence network. The two layers have interconnections based on the user hashtag relations. The model's performance was evaluated on real-world datasets from Twitter related to domestic extremist groups spreading information about COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement during the 2020–2021 time. The model identified Contextual Focal Structure (CFS) sets revealing the context regarding individuals’ interests. We then evaluated the model's efficacy by measuring the influence of the CFS sets in the network using various network structural measures such as the modularity method, network stability, and average clustering coefficient values. The ranking Correlation Coefficient (RCC) was used to conduct a comparative evaluation with real-world scenarios. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Learning to Engage Citizens to Make Smarter Cities

The effectiveness of government policies seems to be a function of increasing citizen participation through the active shaping of public policy and public service delivery (Singh & Kaushik, Platform for citizen engagement for good governance in India (pp. 48–66), 2020). Recognizing the importance of civic engagement, as part of participatory urbanism (Rahmat, Open cities ;Open data: Collaborative cities in the information era (pp. 107–128). Palgrave, 2019) and collaborative governance (Bartoletti & Faccioli, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 13(2), 1132–1151, 2020), this article attempts to highlight and quantify its role in trying to develop the intelligence of a city. This article is based on two pillars. Initially, it decrypts and analyzes the concept of civic engagement and its potential by mapping the dominant bibliographic trends. It then considers the utilization of civic engagement and its integration in the process of developing the intelligence of a city, via a pilot study, the case of the Thessaloniki metropolitan area. Through its two pillars, this article highlights and quantifies the role of civic engagement in the effort to achieve the intelligence of a city and concludes by proposing actions to strengthen and redefine this role. Finally, it is important to emphasize that this article underlines civic engagement in the decision-making process of the respective municipal council or the phase of consultations and proposals and not at the phase of evaluating implemented smart projects. In other words, this article recognizes the importance of preliminary actions and chooses to focus on their benefits. At the same time, it is based on the fact that nowadays, due to the challenges of COVID-19, residents have recognized more keenly than ever the importance of urban space and the benefits of its proper design, so that they may desire to participate more in its urban processes. In addition, residents have become more familiar with the use of technology and are able to use smart applications to evaluate, propose, or vote on municipal project proposals for their cities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.