Digital citizenship and participation through twitter: The case of provincial capital municipalities in Ecuador (2009–2019)

Abstract

Within the framework of citizen empowerment generated by technological development, social media turn out to be a powerful tool of communication and socialization. That is the reason why governmental entities have turned their look towards the unlimited possibilities that some virtual platforms and applications offer. In that sense, this article provides a general vision regarding participation routines of Ecuadorian users through Twitter. To this goal, a monitoring process has been carried out over eight main municipalities in this Andean republic. The results indicate that users actively interact on Twitter accounts belonging to public municipal organizations, spreading information through retweet. Thus, this social network has become an interesting citizen discussion space promoting a larger democratic evolution.