Who should act, when, and where? The SCOPE framework for establishing responsibility and legitimacy in digital citizenship

Abstract This article introduces the Scope of Civic Online Platform Engagement (SCOPE) framework to explain how users interpret and negotiate civic action on social media. It distinguishes between responsibility, which pertains to the obligation side of action (who should act) and legitimacy, which concerns who may act with authority and appropriateness. Building on affordance theory, boundary theory, and research on heuristics, SCOPE demonstrates how affordances shape the conditions for action. Users apply heuristics to interpret cues of visibility, relational ties, spatial mandates, and temporal urgency. These interpretations are then translated into boundary work, shaping responsibility and legitimacy judgments. To operationalize this process, the article proposes decision-making matrices that condense boundary judgments into simple two-question tests of when and by whom civic action is expected. The framework reorients the study of digital citizenship from abstract prescriptions of “good citizenship” to situated and recursive practices of boundary negotiation in platform environments.