Social Media in Government

The Social Media section covered the period when government communications offices, agency policy staff, and the law-enforcement-and-public-safety community were figuring out, in real time, how to operate on platforms that hadn't existed five years earlier. Twitter had launched in 2006; Facebook had opened to general public registration in 2006 and crossed a billion users in October 2012; the smartphone-mobile-data subscriber base in OECD countries went from a minority of users to a majority during exactly this period. None of the institutional playbooks for routine government communications had contemplated any of this.

The Australian agency thread was particularly substantial. The 2009 Government 2.0 Taskforce report (Engage), the New South Wales Police Force's Twitter operation as a positive case study, the Qantas #qantasluxury crisis-comms case as a cautionary one, the Media140 conference circuit, and Craig Thomler's writing all sat in this section. So did the broader social-CRM product wave (Gist, Lotus Connections 3.0, the early Salesforce Chatter integrations) that promised to apply social-software patterns to internal workforce coordination.

By 2013 the section was beginning to track the harder questions: sockpuppetry and coordinated inauthentic behaviour (the HBGary Federal email leak having exposed the contractor tooling for it in February 2011), platform-policy unaccountability, and the gap between government-as-broadcaster and government-as-conversation. The frameworks that emerged — distinguishing permissible anonymity, attribution-claim deception, and platform manipulation — proved more durable than the conferences. They resurfaced in the 2017–2018 IRA-disclosure conversations, in platform integrity policies after 2020, and in current research on coordinated inauthentic behaviour.