Social Media as E-governance Digital Lives of Indian Municipal Bodies and Smart Cities

Abstract

The place of social media in democratic governance is contested. Advocates suggest that it increases institutional accountability and/or public participation, while critics see it as promotional and polarizing. Research on social media use by city governments finds both citizen engagement and city branding, however, little is known about the digital lives of urban governments in India. Here we examine social media use amongst India’s 100 Smart City Mission cities against the wider context of uneven and precarious internet access. We focus on Twitter, a platform routinely used by Indian governments and politicians, through an original dataset of over 4.5 million tweets over ten years—including full timelines for 97 smart cities—to explore social media behaviors and public responses. We argue that 1) while municipal bodies and smart city parastatal entities have different patterns of Twitter use they both work within a framework of city marketing and “civic storytelling”; and 2) although participation initially falls within a performance of tokenistic one-way government to citizen communication, we can trace an evolution of social media use driven by online complaints prompting government response. © 2023 The Author(s).