Reusing social media information in government

•Social media tools provide agencies access to information from a range of sources.•Some of that information is reused and shared with the public.•Government agencies tend to rely on formal information available in the hierarchy of government.•An analysis of government retweets demonstrates the reliance on trusted, institutional sources as opposed to private citizens.•The diversity of trusted institutional sources retweeted increased the amount of quality information available to the public.•The amplification of supportive messages provides a low-risk approach to increase public participation in these networks.

Across policy domains, government agencies evaluate social media content produced by third parties, identify valuable information, and at times reuse information to inform the public. This has the potential to permit a diversity of social media users to be heard in the resulting information networks, but to what extent are agencies relying on private citizens or others outside of the policy domain for message content? In order to examine that question, we analyze the online practices of state-level government agencies. Findings demonstrate that agencies emulate offline content reuse strategies by relying predominately on trusted institutional sources rather than new voices, such as private citizens. Those institutional sources predominantly include other government agencies and nonprofit organizations, and their messages focus mostly on informing and educating the public.