No matter how much Mark Zuckerberg promises that the goal of Facebook has always been to “connect” the world, it’s increasingly clear that social media might not actually be the most effective tool towards accomplishing that goal. Though social media sties like Facebook and Twitter can make two-way communication between entities easier from a logistical standpoint, scholars remain divided on whether or not social media has been able to live up to possibilities in the political realm.
Idris (2018) examines this possibility for two-way communication between government entities and individuals in Indonesia using social media, finding that two-way communication is much more of a social media ideal than a reality. She specifically looks at two Indonesian government agencies’ social media presences, using social network analysis to determine how and when they interacted with other social media users. For the most part, it turns out they don’t. She says, “…the Indonesian government mostly used social media to disseminate governmental information, to dominate social media conversation, and to amplify governmental messages… Thus, advanced communication technology was not used to transform the government to become more engaging and transparent” (p. 352). Basically, just because social media creates the opportunity for dialogue between governments and citizens, doesn’t ensure that the governments reads, considers, or acknowledges citizens’ responses.
Without two-way communication, there is little or no difference between government information and PR campaigns disseminated on social media and propaganda (p. 338). However, the use of social media allows governments to maintain the illusion of increased communication with citizens while actually perfecting their propagandistic techniques. When communicating directly on social media, a government can effectively bypass traditional media, allowing them to release their content exactly as they see fit, keeping journalistic scrutiny out of their initial message. They can also manipulate social media algorithms to amplify their own content, using nothing more than networks of government social media accounts. Idris describes President Widodo’s network of governmental social media accounts’ objective as “to counter negative opinions about the government and at the same time make government information go viral” (p. 350). Though downright measly compared to something like Russian bot networks, these networks of official government accounts can be enough to spread information and shape conversation. Governments using social media for information dissemination also have the opportunity to perfectly test and reshape their messages in real time. Both the Obama and Trump campaigns in the U.S. saw impressive results using methods like A/B testing to craft and recraft their social media advertisements with incredible precision (Bashyakarla, 2019).
Social media makes a lot of things possible that were not before. This includes both increased transparency and easier back and forth communication between governments and citizens, but also easier dissemination of perfectly-crafted propaganda. Idris makes it clear which of these aims the Indonesia government is pursing.
Paper
Idris, I. K. (2018). Government social media in Indonesia: Just another information dissemination tool. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication, 34(4), 337–356. https://doi.org/10.17576/JKMJC-2018-3404-20
Additional References
Bashyakarla, V. (2019). A/B Testing: Experiments in campaign messaging. Retrieved from https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/ab-testing