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Examining Police Agencies’ Dialogic Accounting Practices in Facebook Conversations

Published: 09 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Police agencies have been posting regularly on Facebook and trying to use this social media platform for building community policing. However, little is known about how the public comments to police agencies’ posts and how the agencies further reply to public comments on Facebook. Addressing these questions helps us understand police agencies’ practices of using Facebook for supporting dialogic accounting, i.e., responding to multiple viewpoints, on this social media platform. In this work, we collected 29,928 Facebook posts of 43 municipal police agencies in the U.S. and 628,098 public comments to those agencies’ posts, as well as all replies to the public comments (including replies from other public users and the agencies). We find that the agencies only replied to 907 (0.1%) public comments. Our findings show that (1) the public’s comments varied in diverse topics, but the agencies mainly replied to those comments that were Seeking information; (2) the agencies replied quickly when Acknowledging positive public comments; and (3) the agencies often ignored negative comments. We also discuss design implications for social media platforms to support better dialogic accounting practices.

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    cover image Digital Government: Research and Practice
    Digital Government: Research and Practice  Volume 1, Issue 2
    Special Issue on Government and Social Media and Regular Papers
    April 2020
    120 pages
    EISSN:2639-0175
    DOI:10.1145/3394083
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 09 April 2020
    Accepted: 01 November 2019
    Revised: 01 October 2019
    Received: 01 February 2019
    Published in DGOV Volume 1, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Conversation
    2. Facebook
    3. case study
    4. dialogic accounting
    5. police agency
    6. public comment

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    • Refereed

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    • (2024)Integrating Communications and Surveillance Technologies for effective community policing in NigeriaExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3638175(1-4)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)Hyper‐Local Fear of CrimeProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.80360:1(456-468)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
    • (2021)Examining Interactions Between Community Members and University Safety Organizations through Community-Sourced Risk SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491115:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021

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