“We would be foolish not to use influencers” – trading off public values in public-sector communication

Abstract

This study aims to examine how public administrations perceive and govern collaboration with social-media influencers (SMIs), conceptualizing these partnerships as public values trade-offs between platform logics and administrative norms. Drawing on 19 semistructured interviews with social-media managers in four countries, the study explores the challenges encountered in collaborating with SMI and the governance mechanisms developed to cope with them. It interprets this type of collaboration as involving potential conflict between platform logics (such as authenticity, personalization and immediacy) and core public values (such as transparency, accountability and integrity). The findings reveal recurring dilemmas related to influencer selection and reputational risk, loss of message control, tone and institutional image, legitimacy of public spending, administrative rigidity and impact evaluation. Public administrations respond through governance mechanisms including vetting procedures, contractual formalization, content co-construction, disclosure practices, adapted approval chains and internal capacity-building. These mechanisms do not eliminate difficulties but seek to manage them. By conceptualizing SMI collaborations as public values trade-offs, the study advances the theoretical understanding of digital public communication. It demonstrates how these collaborations compel public administrations to arbitrate between public values within platformized environments structured by commercial and algorithmic logics. In doing so, the study contributes to the literature on public values by empirically examining how such trade-offs are negotiated in practice and how governance mechanisms emerge as attempts to balance, rather than resolve, these tensions.