Legal Commentary

    I'm heading to the Law & Society conference in Chicago tomorrow morning.  I've been working on the paper I'm presenting Sunday morning, which is currently titled "Petitioning in a Public Forum: The Case of Government Sponsored Social Media."  I fully expect this title to change before publication, but I can't seem to come up with a catchy title that invokes the concepts of public forum, petitioning, and social media.  Anyway, I thought I'd use this blog post to test drive a very small argument identifying many of the reasons why governments use social media and why we should want them to. 

    Governments have numerous reasons to establish social media profiles.  The most obvious one is that social media are where the citizens are.  A recent Pew study found that almost half of all citizens use social media as an avenue for discourse.  However, sheer numbers of users are only part of the picture.  Government must speak in order to govern, and social media provide an inexpensive way for governments to bypass intermediaries and speak directly to citizens.  Social media can ?humanize? government interaction with citizens, and make governments appear responsive to citizen concerns.  Social media may also give government access to particularly desirable types of audiences.  For example, social media users appear to skew younger than, say, the citizens who might attend a public speech or government meeting.  Social media audiences are also active consumers of government information, since they must initiate contact in order to encounter the government?s message.  From a government perspective, another advantage of social media is the ability to reach a ?niche? audience, such as all citizens interested in sustainable agriculture or children's television programming.

Citizens, too, have reasons to support government efforts to embrace social media.  A government-sponsored social media forum has the capacity to bring together citizens who might never encounter one another in the public square and to unite them along shared interests and concerns.  Social media create a sense of community and foster engagement in ways that other media often do not.  Social media also give citizens the opportunity to petition and get a timely response to their concerns from the government actors who are supposed to serve them.  Indeed, social media have the potential to foster meaningful public discourse and give citizens more voice in how they are governed. 

[And here's my thesis:]  Currently, however, the murkiness of current public forum doctrines coupled with the Supreme Court's reliance on an outmoded model of government-citizen communication may deter realization of the social media?s full potential to foster First Amendment values.