Yes / Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different areas of social science expertise about the impacts of Covid-19 in digitised societies and policy responses. The authors show how the pandemic supported changes in data collection techniques and dissemination practices for official statistics, and how seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of e-health treatments were largely overcome. They demonstrate how the ethics of artificial intelligence became a primary concern for government legislation at national and international levels, and how the features enabling smart cities to act as drivers of productivity did not necessarily give them an advantage during the pandemic. At the micro-level, families are shown to have become ‘digital by default’, as children were exposed to online risks and opportunities. Globally, the spread of the pandemic provided a fertile ground for cybercrime, while digital disinformation and influencing risked becoming normalised and domesticated.

Social media are increasingly becoming platforms of choice for communication among individuals and groups of the public, and hence organisations are interested in engaging with communities and the public through this form of media to gain intelligence from such engagements to support their decision making processes. Yet, organisations are missing on realising the potential value from using social media for this type of interaction and engagement, while paucity in research addressing practical ways to use social media communication in supporting decision making still persists. This research investigates and proposes a practical framework for using social media – specifically Twitter – as a communications instrument to support the decision making process in police organisations. The research design is based on developing and evaluating a proof of concept representing engagements between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) police as a case study of police organisations with communities and members of the public in the UAE. The proof of concept is designed based on comparing and contrasting current practices by the UAE police with models, trends, and practices discussed in related literature. The research uses the Grounded Theory methodology to guide sampling, data collection, and analysis. The contribution of the research is to both theory and practice. The research addresses a gap in the body of knowledge for a framework that guides the development of models, policies, and practices for the use of social media as a communication instrument to support decision making in governmental organisations, specifically the police. In addition, the framework offers practical insights to policy makers into using different social media to engage with the public in communication, interactions, and knowledge sharing, with the aim of supporting decision making.