Lex Portus (Feb 2020)
E-government and social media in Ukraine: global challenges for legal regulations
Abstract
The present paper is focused on the major challenges to the legal regulation of e-government functioning giving the modern trend of wide application of social media in performing different e-government functions. The current developments in the field of e-government in Ukraine and its legal frameworks are used as an empirical base for the research. However, due to the global nature of social media, the challenges in question can be viewed as the global, or at least the supranational ones. The most important impact factor for reconsidering the e-government legal regulations is the need to utilize the existing social media. Hence, it erects the issue of adaptation of certain internal administrative procedures to the existing ICT solutions and way of functioning with very limited government’s abilities to influence upon them. One of the most important fields of usage of social media on e-governance is providing the transparency and the public information access. To that end different models of web-solutions and respective regulations are reviewed. Besides the separate attention is paid to the cross-border nature of social media, which becomes the issue in respect of their application by public authorities. This is gaining great importance in case of Ukraine, considering critical cyber-security threats revealed within the frameworks of conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Finally, the other challenge for national e-governments is the need to utilize mobile applications for providing administrative services, which also rises considerable security concerns due to involvement of an extensive number of stake-holders. As a result of these processes, there is a need to transform and rethink the current legal framework in order to provide proper balance between security and efficiency and economy of public services delivered via ICT.
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