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Assessing South African Government’S Use Of Social Media For Citizen Participation, Ifeoluwapo Fashoro, Lynette Barnard

The African Journal of Information Systems

Social media are commended as e-participation reformation tools; consequently, governments around the world are adopting social media. South Africa is not exempt from this adoption trend; however, the extent to which social media is used for public participation is yet to be understood. This paper presents a qualitative study exploring social media as an e-participation tool through content analysis of social media pages of the South African government. The study found that while all provinces and municipalities have social media accounts, these platforms are used mainly for information broadcasting, viz., as an extension to their websites. There is limited engagement …