Understanding government discourses on social media: Lessons from the use of YouTube at local level 1

1. Introduction

In the last years, many local governments have adopted digital communication tools. In fact, the latest E-government Global Survey highlighted a large number of cities having an active presence in social media (UN, 2020). The use of digital platforms by local governments have opened new communication channels with the public, which resulted in retailored commitments, namely due to the normative call for interaction and the spread of democratic values, such as transparency and accountability.

The use of social media by governments has been widely analyzed. A recent literature review reported that most of the studies on social media and government have been conducted from quantitative approaches which analyzed the use of platforms by the authorities, leaving aside user experience. Furthermore, the authors highlighted the effects of platform properties on government communication practices have been understudied (Medaglia & Zheng, 2017). An earlier literature review also reported concerns about how to identify government best practices in social media, as the use of each platform requires specific skills that do not always guarantee successful results (Magro, 2012).

This research contributes to the analysis of the government’s use of YouTube, the world’s largest audiovisual platform with 1.9 million monthly active users (YouTube, n.d.). Previously, Da Silva (2013) examined the European Commission channel on YouTube (EUTube channel), finding that the platform was used as a channel to retransmit messages broadcast on television, but exchange with users remained limited. On the other hand, Bonsón and Bednárová (2018) reported during their study on the use of YouTube by 75 municipalities in 15 Western European countries a positive correlation between the use of the platform by governments and the number of users who engage with the content, i.e., the more active the usage by government the more likely users are to watch the content and subscribe to the channel. However, the use of this platform by governments in North America has been sparsely analyzed. Therefore, this paper aims to understand how the discursive exchanges of two municipalities, located in different contexts, change due to the appropriation of the same digital communication tool: YouTube.

The paper is organized in six sections, including this introduction. The second part presents a proposal for the new conditions emerging between local governments and users from the use of social media, followed by the third section which is dedicated to summarizing previous research on digital platforms and its use in government. The fourth part explains the digital methods and content analysis used in this research to follow the traces made by the local governments included in the study. The results highlighted key differences in the discursive purposes of local governments when using the YouTube platform as a device of communication with inhabitants.

2. Toward a new communication contract of local governments

Every speech is framed in a communication situation, defined as the circumstances in which at least two actors communicate, a speaker and an addressee, through the exchange of discourses with the aim to understand each other (Charaudeau, 2015). In turn, the communication situation is regulated by a communication contract that sets the limits and procedures of the production and interpretation of the speech (Charaudeau & Maingueneau, 2002). It comprises all the conditions of the exchange, such as the identity of the actors, the material circumstances, the purpose of the speech, and the discursive strategies employed (Charaudeau, 2002). The author emphasizes that each communication situation generates a communication contract. In this sense, he distinguishes different global situations of communication, which share common characteristics that can be labeled as “situational genres”. For example, the global situation of media communication, which explains the discursive exchange between the media and the public, or the global situation of political communication, related to the exchange between political actors, governments or citizens. This article is interested in the former, by using the communication contract as a metaphor to explain the evolving communication situation between local governments and citizens, rooted in the contemporary material circumstances of discursive exchange.

From this framework, the birth of a first contract of communication between local governments and citizens was motivated by the consolidation of democracy as the main system in Western countries. This scenario led public organizations to be more transparent by adopting a public relations model which shared the interests and actions of the organizations through the media (Daguenais, 2013). As a result, from the 1980s onwards creation of communication services within municipalities was intensified. These organizational arrangements promoted the integration of institutional arenas with accountability as the main asset, through meetings with citizens, neighborhood councils, district assemblies and information tours. At present, the emergence of new material circumstances, such as the expansion of democratic values (Demers, 2008) and the institutionalization of social media to government communication services (Mergel & Bretschneider, 2013), are pushing for a change in the communication situation that remained stable during the last forty years. Indeed, it calls public organizations to establish more discursive and bidirectional exchanges with inhabitants by using digital communication tools. As a result, it seems possible the emergence of a new communication contract between local governments and citizens, rooted in innovative communication devices like social media (González-Galván, 2020).

The new communication contract enables a discursive exchange between local governments and citizens on three levels: 1) informative, 2) operational and 3) political. Each level has a purpose, which gives to the participants a different identity in each communicative action, and usually it includes the other two in an explicit or indirect way, thus recalling the dichotomous character – administrative and political – of public organizations. The informative level consists of making citizens aware of the services offered. On this axis, each local government becomes a service provider that informs, and the citizens assume the role of service users or consumers, that is, the purpose is this level of discourse is transparency. At the operational level, the government is seen as a planning organization by explaining projects, procedures, decisions and choices made to answer multiple public issues, i.e., the purpose is to be accountable to citizens. At the political level, that of elections, elected officials, oppositions and public debates, citizens become political actors with differentiated influence and power; that is to achieve governance. Above, Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of the three levels of communication activity in local governments.

Previous studies had shown that governments are using ICT, including social media, to strengthen transparency, democracy, openness, and efficiency of public services (Luna-Reyes et al., 2010). Governments have been developing legal regulations with stakeholders and implemented modernization strategies based on digital technologies which aim to improve the responsiveness that traditional communication channels have failed to achieve (Mickoleit, 2014; OECD, 2019). In this sense, there are significant differences in the use of social media by governments regarding the type of platform, the level of government and the democratic development in which this appropriation takes place. The following is a brief review of previous studies conducted on the use of social media at the municipal level of three of the world’s most important platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

4. Social media use by local governments in Canada and Mexico

The renewal of the commercial relationship between Canada, the United States and Mexico through the USMCA strengthened the exchange of digital products between these countries in terms of e-commerce and digital platforms. Beyond the trade agreement, the USMCA countries have general similarities in terms of government organization in three levels and the use of digital tools by the public sector. A previous study showed that UMSCA countries were using ICT, including social media, to strengthen transparency, democracy, openness, and make public services more efficient (Luna-Reyes et al., 2010). Furthermore, Canada, the United States and Mexico have adopted national Open Government strategies, reaching the develop of legal regulations with stakeholders and modernization activities based on digital technologies (OECD, 2019). Recently, the E-Government Survey ranked in the United States in the 9th worldwide position, while Canada held the 28th and Mexico achieve the 61 st place (UN, 2020). Despite the differences in the E-Government developing, local governments in Canada and Mexico have been open to social media by creating accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Gruzd and Roy (2016) found that four Canadian cities used Facebook and Twitter as an extension of their website, that is, they were using these platforms as a communication channel to report on city events and issue updates on services. On the other hand, Sandoval-Almazán et al. (2018) evidenced different levels of Facebook, and Twitter use by Mexican states governments. However, less is known about the use of YouTube by local governments in both countries; in particular, about how municipalities’ discourses are developed in these digital spaces and how local governments interact with citizens.

Therefore, this article is interested in the use of YouTube by local governments of Canada and Mexico. The analysis was focused on the use of YouTube by two municipalities: Quebec (Canada) and Morelia (Mexico). These governments were considered for the research because of their comparative potential for the region. On the one hand, both cities with a tourist vocation and international scope with more than four hundred years of existence had been included as part of the World Heritage Sites (UNESCO, n.d.). On the other hand, the geographical and economic situation has allowed them to develop in a different manner, especially in digital government, civil society development and democratization.

In 2010, the Quebec City began exploring social media as a communication tool, under the direction of the city’s communication service bureau. The first platform used was YouTube, attracted by the spirit of free use, innovative communication practices and with the goal of showing all the audiovisual content that the city already had in other spaces (Porter, 2010). A little later that year, the city opened its Twitter account to make accessible services adapted to today’s life and to be at the forefront of the needs of citizens (Fournier, 2010). The first uses of Twitter were related to information about the city, and occasionally, this tool was also used to answer users’ questions. On the other hand, the city’s entry on the Facebook platform was less easy, because in 2010 there were already at least two citizen initiatives under the name “Ville de Québec”, so it was necessary to negotiate with these actors to transfer the work already done to the municipal organization (Fortin, 2012).

Meanwhile, the municipality of Morelia has had a later appropriation of social media, also under the management of the social communication office of the city. Its first digital communication channel was a Facebook page created in 2015. On Twitter, the city account was launched in 2014 as the official channel on this platform. The YouTube channel would go on until 2016. As can be seen, the municipality of Morelia has gradually incorporated more communication channels; however, continuity in the use of the tools has been subject to changes in government management.

In both cases it can be observed that the city establishes a new set of conditions when incorporating social media as a communication channel with citizens. For example, in the Quebec City website, social media are described as a tool to “disseminate information, promotion of the city; creation of a community around the City of Quebec identity; recruitment; urgent communications; participation in citizen exchanges; consultation; emergence of new ideas and strategic intelligence” (Quebec City, 2016). In a scenario where YouTube has been adopted in different contexts, the comparison appears as a possibility to explore how a new communication contract can be reflected through the discourses of these cities on this audiovisual platform. Namely, once that they have even established policies and it is fully institutionalized through the government communications office. The main channel of these municipalities on YouTube was created in the last ten years, as can be seen in Table 2. QuebecVille channel belonging to Quebec City was created in 2010, until 2019 it had 3,517 subscribers and had shared 406 videos. This channel can be found using the following keywords in French: “ville de quebec”, “Quebec City”, “Quebec major”, “régis labeaume” and “Quebec”. QuebecVille channel has had a sustained growth in the past years; in fact, this channel had 414 subscribers in 2013 (De León Vázquez, 2015) which means that in six years the channel has increased by 800% the number of users who watch its content. On the other hand, GobiernodeMoreliaMX channel was created in 2016. It has 1,270 followers and it has shared 215 videos. This channel could be found on the platform by using the following keywords in Spanish: “Morelia”, “Ayuntamiento”, “Gobierno de Morelia”.

In order to explore the use of YouTube by the local governments of Quebec and Morelia, this research used a mixed method: digital methods to mine data, and content analysis to create categories of analysis. The digital methods propose to follow the medium and take advantage of the nature and structure of the data available on the digital platforms (Rogers, 2009).

As a first step, a technique of scraping data from YouTube was used. This method allowed us to extract structured information (Marres & Weltevrede, 2004) from both channels by using the YouTube Application Programming Interface (API), a set of routines, protocols and tasks that can be queried to obtain a set of data located in the software platform to which they belong (Caliandro & Gandini, 2017). For the extraction, the Video List and Video Information tools from the YouTube data toolkit were used (Rieder, 2015). The operation covered the videos published from the beginning of the channel, QuebecVille (2010) and GobiernodeMoreliaMX (2016) until September 2019. The resulting data includes the date each video was posted, title, description, categories, length, number of views, likes, comments and dislikes (see Table 3).

Once the data was obtained, a textual analysis of the title and description of each video was performed to classify the video’s content. This first part of the survey allowed us to eliminate 97 videos because they do not have a description, which means that it is not possible to know the textual purpose for which they were shared. A total of 370 videos were selected in the QuebecVille channel and 154 in the GobiernodeMoreliaMX channel. Then, a content analysis technique was applied which is defined as “a method of qualitative data processing (…) that involves the development and use of systematic reading models based on the use of explicit rules to analyze and interpret texts” (Landry, 1997).

Following Bonsón and Bednárová (2018), the author created an alphabetical list of the municipal services of each city, resulting in two groups of keywords related to the activities and services of the municipalities (available in the Appendix). This process allowed to classify the videos according to the description of their content and to create categories. The classification of the videos was carried out using the Keyword Extractor tool on the Netlytic software, which allowed automatic identification of the content of a text corpus (Gruzd, 2016). During the research, this tool helped identify keywords related to each municipal service or activity. As can be seen in the Table 4, the software classifies the texts according to the keywords previously indicated by the author based on an alphabetical list of the public services.

In addition, all videos were rechecked manually by the author to corroborate the automatic classification. This allowed to confirm a 98% effectiveness in the Netlytic software in the classification, since only 10 of the videos were reclassified in each channel analyzed. The author resolved the classification differences through observation of each video. In turn, the publication date of each video was reviewed to determine how often the cities were publishing on YouTube. The comments for each video were also analyzed to see the frequency of interaction between the cities and users.

The findings showed a differentiated use of YouTube by the communication services of the analyzed cities. Even though the YouTube platform was institutionalized as a communication tool in both governments, the daily use has not been consolidated. Among the 370 videos analyzed in the QuebecVille channel, it was noted that two of the videos published were press conferences, seven were information sessions and eight were public consultations, these former videos stand out from the others because they use 4D animation or live broadcasts. In terms of the frequency of publication, QuebecVille channel published 53 days between June 16, 2010, and February 14, 2019. On some days, the channel published up to 36 videos, while on other days there was only one video posted. By contrast, GobiernodeMoreliaMX channel was mainly used to broadcast live videos of the monthly sessions of the City Council. Another large percentage of content was dedicated to publishing short videos, and only a small part of the content was destined to inform about the city’s services and opinion polls. The channel published videos in the period under study, managing to launch at least one video per month on average. However, there were periods of up to six months in 2018, in which no content was shared.

On YouTube both municipalities had the possibility to classify their videos to target a specific audience. The findings showed that this possibility was mostly taken advantage of by the Quebec City channel, as shown in Table 5. QuebecVille classified its videos according to its communication objective, while GobiernodeMoreliaMX only used one category out of the 15 available on the platform.

The videos analyzed also showed that local governments had a communication agenda that answered to the concerns of each government, although both municipalities paid special attention to the promotion of tourism. For instance, the channel of the municipality of Quebec had more content on three topics: Culture, Heritage, and International Relations (21.4%), Office of Tourism of Quebec (15.1%) and Office of Major Events (13.8%). Less attention was given to the Municipal Council and the Citizen Relations Center. The Table 6 shows the general classification of the QuebecVille videos.

The videos posted in Quebec City’s main YouTube channel showed that the city has maintained its government communication discourses at the informational level, because most of its publications were intended to make its services know which suggests that the main objective of the municipality was to promote transparency of the government. Only a small portion was being allocated to the operational (4.8%) and political (1.9%) levels. For most of the period analyzed, the local government of Quebec City presented a service provider identity. New services such as mobile applications and Open Data also appeared in the discourse, highlighting new possibilities for interactions and collaboration between the city and the inhabitants. Since 2017, the government of Quebec has adopted the identity of the public policy manager on YouTube (4.8% of videos analyzed), which indicated the emergence of an operational level, at least in the discourse. That is, QuebecVille channel was used to broadcast information sessions and live public consultations related to projects on Development and Environmental Planning and Intelligent Mobility.

The videos published on the GobiernodeMoreliaMX channel were mostly focused on the City Council Sessions with 37% of the total content, as can be observed in Table 7. A second group of videos was dedicated to the City’s Festivals (18.2%), Government Achievements (11.1%), Urban Development (9.8%), Citizen Security (7.8%) and Public Works (5.8%). This suggests that the local government of Morelia was more interested in describing and explaining the reasons why certain actions were taken, since the City Council sessions were the hotspot for government decisions. Therefore, it mostly adopted a public policy manager’s identity in the videos published on its YouTube channel with the purpose to be more accountable about its activities.

In addition, interaction between local governments and users in both municipalities through YouTube channels remained at a low level throughout the analysis period. For instance, only 34.2% of videos on the QuebecVille channel contained user comments. A total of 673 comments were made by 461 users, but 78.4% of users participated only once.

In this regard, it should be noted that the QuebecVille channel made only 19 comments in response to users’ questions and, secondly, the channel deactivated the possibility of commenting on five of the published videos. This is consistent with the findings of Da Silva (2013) who reported that the EUTube channel frequently disabled comments on videos to avoid situations that would exceed the ideals of the exchange between political actors and users. This practice conditions the exchanges between the participants and therefore may hinder the purpose of communication. As can be seen below, the interventions made by the municipal government of Quebec to respond to users’ questions revealed a faster response through other platforms, like Facebook.

The GobiernodeMoreliaMX channel was even less interactive with users. During the period analyzed, the channel did not respond to any of the comments, even though the function was activated in all the videos. Only 14 followers of the channel made 23 comments on the videos analyzed (14.93%), so there was not a consolidated response to the videos. This can be related to the low frequency of publication since there were even long periods in which no content was shared. Our argument is supported by the findings of Bonsón and Bednárová (2018), who showed that a more active presence could lead to a greater degree of interaction with users.

This paper was carried out on the idea that the appropriation of new digital tools by local governments takes place in the context of the 21st century, where the ideal of public communication, traditionally founded in democracy, promotes horizontal and bidirectional communicational exchanges. In turn, the communication acts are developed through new communication devices, which implies a change in the material conditions of the exchange and therefore, the potential renewal of the communication contract established between local governments and users, where the promise of responsiveness and multilayer exchange is present, implicitly, or explicitly. However, the results of this research have shown that interaction between local governments and users tends to be limited despite national advances in E-government, confirming previous research on YouTube (Da Silva, 2013; Bonsón & Bednárová, 2018).

This study also showed that local governments had developed their discourses on different levels, so that they no longer identify themselves in social media only as service providers, but also as policy managers and political actors. The above points to the fact that municipalities are increasingly concerned with generating discourses that legitimize their actions, that is, it is no longer enough to show the results; now it is also indispensable to explain how the decision was made and under what criteria. In other words, contemporary and democratic governments are obliged to establish transparency mechanisms, but they are also encouraged to be accountable and to discuss with the public to provide the greatest public good. This situation undoubtedly changes the paradigm under which the communication practices of local governments have traditionally been carried out, because it would move from an information model to the creation of a relationship with digital platforms users. In the same vein, the findings showed that the institutionalization of YouTube as a communication channel create an expectative in users related to the frequency of publication, the content, and the level of the message. Therefore, it is essential to emphasize that each new platform incorporated into the government’s communication strategies will result in a new promise that will be accompanied by its own needs, both human and material.

As part of a more general research on contemporary government communication practices, this article focused on how the current uses of YouTube reflect the establishment of a new communication contract between local governments and users by analyzing the discourses of two cities in Canada and Mexico. The comparative research between Quebec City and Morelia so far has shown that, both cities were embracing social media in the direction of citizen interaction. However, our findings suggested that this lead was not significant on YouTube at least in the sense of user’s interaction and government’s responsiveness. This article also showed that both cities are developing different discursive levels, which generated new identities for users and authorities. At the end of this first phase of research, a new communication contract seems possible, based on the diversification of the local government’s communication purposes, the new material circumstances of the discursive exchange and the inclusion of new partners in public conversations, but to determine its concrete features, it will be necessary to address the limitations of this study by expanding the cities analyzed. Finally, further research is needed to explore how local governments in Canada and Mexico develop discursively on other platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter.