Social Media in E-Governance

Abstract

Social media has enormous prospectus to expand the usage of Internet and to realize full benefits of e-Governance by promoting, intensifying, improving and monitoring its offered services at reduced costs, increasing citizen usage of e-Services and e-Participation, posting job advertisements, announcing and marketing events, and seeking public feedback, opinion, cooperation and collaborate across its geographically diverse citizens and thus increase transparency and trust on government. However, at the same time using social media in e-Governance may impose diverse challenges which unless are not adequately addressed to, may hamper its successful integration with e-Governance. This chapter highlights the prospectus of social media and its current usage in e-Governance in India. It discusses the potential issues especially issues related to security and privacy of individuals, employees, infrastructure and data that may limit its benefits in e-Governance. It examines and compares social media policy of government of India with similar guidelines of some other nations in terms of employee's access, account management, acceptable use, employee conduct, content, security, legal issues and citizen conduct besides discussing emerging mobility and mobile social media policy of government of India and enumerates their merits, demerits and scope for further improvements.