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Examining Police Agencies’ Dialogic Accounting Practices in Facebook Conversations

Authors:

Yun HuangAuthors Info & Claims

Digital Government: Research and Practice, Volume 1, Issue 2

Article No.: 16, Pages 1 - 17

https://doi.org/10.1145/3372022

Published: 09 April 2020 Publication History

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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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Cited By

Zaidi HO’Connor C(2024)Policing social media: Are procedural justice principles guiding Canadian police interactions online?International Journal of Police Science & Management10.1177/1461355724122807526:2(258-268)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14613557241228075
Wu QHemsley J(2023) Hyper‐Local Fear of Crime: Identifying Linguistic Cues of Fear in Crime Talk on Reddit Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.80360:1(456-468)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.803
Ming SMayfield RCheng HWang KHuang Y(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449111

Index Terms

Examining Police Agencies’ Dialogic Accounting Practices in Facebook Conversations
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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Published In

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

Editors:
Soon Ae Chun
City University of New York, USA
,
Beth Simone Simone Noveck
The Governance Lab and New York University, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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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Cited By

Zaidi HO’Connor C(2024)Policing social media: Are procedural justice principles guiding Canadian police interactions online?International Journal of Police Science & Management10.1177/1461355724122807526:2(258-268)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14613557241228075
Wu QHemsley J(2023) Hyper‐Local Fear of Crime: Identifying Linguistic Cues of Fear in Crime Talk on Reddit Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.80360:1(456-468)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.803
Ming SMayfield RCheng HWang KHuang Y(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449111

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