Crisis Informatics: Perspectives of Trust - Is Social Media a Mixed Blessing? (original) (raw)
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Trust, but verify: social media models for disaster management
A lack of trust in the information exchanged via social media may significantly hinder decision-making by community members and emergency services during disasters. The need for timely information at such times, though, challenges traditional ways of establishing trust. This paper, building on a multi-year research project that combined social media data analysis and participant observation within an emergency management organisation and in-depth engagement with stakeholders across the sector, pinpoints and examines assumptions governing trust and trusting relationships in social media disaster management. It assesses three models for using social media in disaster management—information gathering, quasi-journalistic verification, and crowdsourcing—in relation to the guardianship of trust to highlight the verification process for content and source and to identify the role of power and responsibilities. The conclusions contain important implications for emergency management organisations seeking to enhance their mechanisms for incorporating user-generated information from social media sources in their disaster response efforts.
Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World
Proceedings of the …, 2007
Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizenside information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-line.
Trust-building through Social Media Communications in Disaster Management
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '15 Companion, 2015
Social media provides a digital space-a meeting place, for different people, often representing one or more groups in a society. The use of this space during a disaster, especially where information needs are high and the availability of factually accurate and ethically sourced data is scarce, has increased substantially over the last 5-10 years. This paper attempts to address communication in social media and trust between the public and figures of authority during a natural disaster in order to suggest communication strategies that can enhance or reinforce trust between these bodies before, during and after a natural disaster.
International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD), 2018
Learning and understanding what happened before, during, and after a crisis is extremely important for the improvement of the response process. For this purpose, social media has become an important communication medium used by both the affected persons and the emergency management services (EMSs). However, in different crises, different information may be needed, and the information shared in social media varies in its usefulness: It could be highly critical or completely irrelevant to the rescue operation. Supplying the best possible up-to-date information is crucial to the EMS, whose actions based on that information may save lives and resources. This paper studies a particular use case of extreme weather in Norway and identifies the information needs, the problem faced by EMSs, and how they use social media. It, further, pinpoints what different social media analysis platforms can provide in this type of crisis. The results of the research are criteria that social media analysis should follow to address EMSs' concerns. The output of this work can be used to more precisely describe social media communication for crises and to design more efficient platforms for information retrieval from social media.
Policy Issues Facing the Use of Social Networking Information During Times of Crisis
2010
The exchange of information during times of crisis/disaster has traditionally been the purview of public safety, the National Guard and other local, state or federal authorities. However, this model is undergoing a change with the availability of new mobile communications capabilities and the rise of social networking sites. The general public can now create and share information about crises as they unfold, and researchers have documented the timeliness and surprising accuracy of this information. As part of a large National Science Foundation funded project, researchers at the University of Colorado are developing tools to extract, organize and assess the flow of crisis related information as posted on social networking sites. With the promise of improved warning and coordination, such tools should help reduce the impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics and terrorist threats. In this model, members of the public can obtain (and produce) information about an emergency that is specialized to their needs-as well as meta-information specialized for crisis situations-that helps them make judgments about the ever-growing amount of information. Such metainformation includes features of its source; judgments about the authoritativeness of the source; its concurrence (or not) with official sources; its timeliness (as the information may be better than official sources); other spatio-temporal features of the information's life; and anticipation of who would be looking for this information and why. Data mining and information extraction techniques have a critical place here, as does the creation of trust models and security techniques to offer privacy or possibly anonymity.
Large-scale crises challenge the ability of public safety and security organisations to respond efficient and effectively. Meanwhile, citizens' adoption of mobile technology and rich social media services is dramatically changing the way crisis responses develop. Empowered by new communication media (smartphones, text messaging, internet-based applications and social media), citizens are the in situ first sensors. However, this entire social media arena is unchartered territory to most public safety and security organisations.
Using ICT & Social Media in Disasters: Opportunities & Risks for Government
Risk and Resilience Report, 2013
When a crisis is unfolding, people no longer wait for an official statement from government actors; rather they turn to the news media, they go to Twitter or Facebook, they log onto forums and blogs, etc., because they expect information and they can get it quickly from various sources. In such a dynamic information environment, if a government lacks a policy on how to use social media, particularly in crisis situations (meaning it does not act, or act appropriately), then it may face a loss of credibility and struggle with the management of a crisis. To get ahead of this curve, debating the risks and opportunities of using social media is a critical first step to building a sound social media policy and identifying certain engagement guidelines. This report examines four different issue areas to analyze how social media is used in the context of risk and crisis communication. These areas include: public safety and preparedness; emergency warnings, alerts and requests for assistance; recovery efforts; and, finally, monitoring and situational awareness. In the context of each of these areas, we highlight the key literature and real-life examples to explore the risks vs. opportunities in the utility of social media. These four areas capture the role of engagement and strategy in both the risk and crisis space.
The Transformative Power of Social Media on Emergency and Crisis Management
Advancements
There is a wind of transformation blowing across the world today. It is changing the face of emergency management and every field of human endeavor. It is called "social media". These days, social media is redefining crisis preparedness through the increasing participation of the masses in the creation and distribution of content in ways that surpass the capacity of the mass media and public authorities. Public-generated content has been found to be useful in all phases of preparedness. Unfortunately, most public safety authorities are still suspicious of using social media in engaging and disseminating information. This paper examines this new area of transformation that is having significant consequences on public safety and public life. As the scenario unfolds, emergency managers have a tough time choosing between the mass media and social media. Metaphorically, it is a race between a 'hippo' (mass media) and cheetah (social media).