Co-creation and Social Media in Public Policy Development

Social Media has lately witnessed a roller coaster progress, from timidly connecting students to performing countless and chameleonic functions, tailored to the users’ needs, to being a pipeline for vast amounts of data that provided support for infamously ran election campaigns. It has thus equally contributed to changes in social practices, redefining the public sphere, reshaping organizations, voicing the silent actors, while bridging societies to their public institutions and governments to people. Moreover, the current digital transformation is protecting people’s rights, ensuring that all players act safely and responsibly, while technology unites people in a leveled up democratic process, to make change happen. In this context, a plethora of research speaks about raising awareness activities (Stoch& Roodt, 2016), highlighting that digital media can build social capital (Armstrong& Butcher, 2018) or generate collective action (Milan, 2015; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) in organized “cloud protesting”. More recent research concentrates on activism as a powerful tool for decolonisation (Garbe, 2024) or explores its utility and effectiveness to advance citizens’ voices where the absence of strong institutions is a challenge in transitional democracies, (Saka & Ojo, 2024) through connective emotion.This helps participants digitally organize themselves, even though they sometimes lack an identifying cause (George & Leidner, 2019.) Concurrently, the present paper shows how social media mobilization backed by real public space initiatives and the power of social learning, social support and connectivity have been used in a co-creation campaign aimed at bringing change in Romanian public policy. The tested hypothesis was that social media provides an open, democratic and widely available arena for citizen discussions and involvement in developing public policies, with goal oriented results that serve the public interest, with legitimacy and triggered authority involvement. First we defined collaboration, the co-creation of public policies and their role in actively and directly involving citizens in the governing process, then reviewed literature on social media’s role as a platform for open discussions, drafting and supporting public policies. To gather data and validate the hypothesis we used Zelist Monitor application, to track the activity of the campaign’s Facebook page and analyzed fan metrics, interaction index and responsivity, engagement and sentiment analysis. Results have validated the hypothesis and thus they can further be used in future research, to identify which of the public values can garner enough support for co-creation to occur and thus lead to social change.