Beyond Cheap and Biased: Informal Volunteering on Social Media During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The ability of informal social media networks to facilitate civic participation is a major topic of political and scholarly debate. Some studies find that social media networks support little, low-cost, periodic, and demographically biased civic participation, while others find the opposite. We argue that many studies do not have an adequate point of comparison to determine the contribution of social media networks relative to other organizational forms, such as formal volunteering. Using an original population survey on volunteering during the COVID crisis, we compare social media networks to other types of organizations in terms of the relative volume of participation, the type of participation, the persistence of the volunteer, and volunteers’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. We do not find that social media networks contribution is comparatively trivial, low cost, and biased when compared to other organizational forms. Volunteers organized on social media are, however, less persistent when compared to volunteers in formal civil society organizations.