A collaborative discourse or only a collection of voices? An exploratory study of the use of social media in the e-participation domain

Social media have been introduced in the eParticipation domain to engage citizens in collaborative discourse, allowing for low cost and low effort exchanges of information among actors who are distant from time and space perspectives. Such online communities rely heavily on the technical capabilities of social media to enable community dynamics, and the interest in what opportunities and challenges social media provide for engaging in collaborative discourse is high. Several studies have discussed the engagement of individuals in online communities through social media; however, there is still room for contributions shedding light on how information is actually exchanged through these digital platforms. We tackle this point in this paper by running an exploratory analysis of the discourse that is developing on social media channels used by representatives of a political party (the Five Star Movement) to engage citizens in discussions of proposals and idea generation, and we reflect on our findings in light of key characteristics of the public sphere. The results of our study show that social media are mainly used as places for engaging citizens, supporting representatives, and holding them accountable for their actions. Based on the results of our exploratory work, we formulate some considerations for future studies of social media usage in the eParticipation field.