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Top-down, Non-inclusive and Non-egalitarian

Published: 18 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Social media are relatively new channels of communication between members of parliament and constituents. This study uses automatic analysis to produce a birds-eye-view of the content uploaded to Facebook pages of all MPs during an entire term of parliament. The findings demonstrate that the MP-Facebook sphere is non-egalitarian, in that it follows skewed distributions of post publication and engagement between MP pages; not-inclusive, in that pages of coalition members receive much more engagement in comparison to pages of members of the oppositions; and ‘top-down’, in that posts by pages receive dramatically more engagement then posts by users, suggesting MPs’ ability to set the agenda manifest in their pages, and users’ extremely limited ability to do so. These phenomena occur not just in routine periods but during emergency periods as well, when the scope of posting by users, and engagement with posts, significantly increase.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Bibi and Mr. Prime Minister: do different Facebook identities imply different messages for political leaders?Online Information Review10.1108/OIR-01-2021-000446:3(464-482)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2021
  • (2020)A Systematic Review of Social Media for Intelligent Human-Computer Interaction Research: Why Smart Social Media is Not EnoughIntelligent Human Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-030-68449-5_48(499-510)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2020

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cover image ACM Other conferences
dg.o '19: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
June 2019
533 pages
ISBN:9781450372046
DOI:10.1145/3325112
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 18 June 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Big Data Analysis
  2. Engagement
  3. Facebook
  4. Political Communication
  5. Political Discourse
  6. e-parliament
  7. social media

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View all
  • (2021)Bibi and Mr. Prime Minister: do different Facebook identities imply different messages for political leaders?Online Information Review10.1108/OIR-01-2021-000446:3(464-482)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2021
  • (2020)A Systematic Review of Social Media for Intelligent Human-Computer Interaction Research: Why Smart Social Media is Not EnoughIntelligent Human Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-030-68449-5_48(499-510)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2020

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