This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement.
Through an analysis of relevant literature and open-ended survey responses from 2501 Singaporeans, this article proposes a conceptual framework to understand how individuals authenticate the information they encounter on social media. In broad strokes, we find that individuals rely on both their own judgment of the source and the message, and when this does not adequately provide a definitive answer, they turn to external resources to authenticate news items.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.