Can Cities Harness Social Media for Good in an Age of Misinformation?
Against the backdrop of a lot of bad news about social media, I spent much of last year talking to civic participation experts about how social media can actually be a good thing for cities.
The day Munich first entered lockdown in March 2020, a fire engine drove through my neighbourhood trumpeting: “Bleiben Sie zu Hause”, Stay home. Watching from my studio apartment, the message was a stark wake-up call to our new reality, and the possibility of weeks confined alone to my thirty-square-metre sanctuary.
What was my reaction? I went on Facebook, then Twitter — stuck at home, I wanted to know how other people were feeling. I found a post from Munich City showing the fire engines heading out across the city. Among many comments of thanks, was a suggestion: why not have the message in more languages? Many people in my area don’t understand it. The next day, I noticed the recording included the instruction in English: Please stay home. Because I’m a political scientist, I thought: wow, government responsiveness in action— we might be in isolation, but social media offers a way to stay connected with our city. This, I thought, was an exciting moment.
But the global narrative on social media became very different as the year evolved. An ‘infodemic’ flourished online, giving birth to conspiracy theories and anti-lockdown protests, and the outgoing US President’s tweets incited a violent attack on the US Capitol.
Against this backdrop, I spent much of 2020 talking to cities about how social media can be used as part of constructive citizen engagement efforts during research for a Master’s in Politics and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. Those conversations gave me hope about the role social media can play in deepening engagement between citizens and their governments, broadening the overall scope of democracy to include citizens in everyday decision-making.
Here are some reflections based on those conversations.
Tackling misinformation
In times of crisis, social media platforms are a vital channel for disseminating information and raising collective social awareness. At the pandemic’s onset, many healthcare workers took to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to share their experiences from the pandemic’s frontlines and communities self-organised to encourage social distancing and basic hygiene. Of course, misinformation also proliferated. But the Taiwanese government — a pioneer in e-participation — demonstrated how social media combined with a bit of creativity can prove an effective channel for combatting false information, launching a campaign called “humour over rumour”.
Direct access to the people that matter
Under Covid restrictions, social media has helped local governments ensure citizens can still access essential services. Newcastle city council in the UK, for example, has been using Facebook throughout the pandemic to keep citizens informed about available support and services, such as help with rent issues, business grants, job searches, booking a test or getting a vaccine. Social media is also a great way for local governments to listen to their citizens — both directly and indirectly. For example, researchers analysed Twitter and Reddit posts to gain a better understanding of the effect of lockdowns on children’s exposure to violence.
More ideas = better policy
The scale of the challenges that cities are facing — from beating Covid-19 to building affordable, sustainable communities — means that governments need citizens’ help and expertise. Social media and other online platforms can enable this citizen-government engagement. For example, at the start of the pandemic, the German government ran a successful online hackathon, bringing together participants from around the world to come up with solutions to the pandemic’s problems — 150 or so of those solutions are now being implemented, demonstrating the power of diverse ideas.
Where’s the nuance?
One thing that’s key to crack when engaging citizens to improve city policymaking is the quality of discussions taking place. In the academic literature, this is often referred to as enabling ‘deliberation’ — careful discussion and consideration. The problem is that social media doesn’t encourage open, nuanced discussion. As many have noted, it tends to do the opposite. Studies have found that it’s therefore a small minority on the political extremes that mostly engage in political topics on social media. Moderates prefer to stay out of conflict and away from online discussions. This makes many city administrations afraid to use social media altogether. The reputational risks are high and the prospect of having to manage sometimes aggressive citizen feedback, daunting. Yet, given social media’s importance as a communications channel, disengagement altogether is no longer an option for cities.
Not all social media is the same
We tend to lump social media together as though it’s all the same, but there are fundamental differences. Twitter’s character count restrictions make it very difficult to express nuance (unless you’re an exceptionally eloquent writer), no doubt helping to push discussions on the platform to the extremes. The ability to create a fake profile and the growth of bots has also diminished accountability on both Facebook and Twitter. But platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which focus on photo and video content, have so far proved tamer, at least when it comes to politics. There’s also been a surge of new platforms since the pandemic’s onset. Clubhouse, for example, is working its way through communities on an invitation-only basis, and its use of audio over text may help to improve accountability.
One piece in the participation puzzle
Social media shouldn’t become the only way to engage citizens. Instead, it should be seen as part of a wider citizen participation movement. The cities I spoke to during my research stressed that, beyond the pandemic, social media needs to become part of a broader strategy for citizen participation to balance its pros and cons. This means using ongoing social media engagement to support less frequent, more traditional civic forums like townhalls, where extensive deliberation can take place.
There’s a lot about social media that needs fixing. But, like it or not, social media is now an integral part of how we receive and share information, and build and maintain community. Social media certainly shouldn’t be the sum of local governments’ citizen engagement activities, but clearly it has a key role to play.
