858 words – MR
STAYING AHEAD OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Controlling rumours is crucial during a disaster or terrorist attack
by Ashley Potter
Authorities around the world should set up emergency communication teams to manage the amount of misinformation circulating on social media during disasters, terrorist attacks and other social crises.
Dr Onook Oh of Warwick Business School, Manish Agrawal of the University of South Florida and Raghav Rao of the State University of New York at Buffalo studied social media use in three major incidents, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. Their research revealed that Twitter is emerging as the dominant social reporting tool for eye-witness accounts and shared information on disasters, terrorist attacks and social crises as a collective effort to make sense of what is happening.
When the online community create and exchange the news rather than official news channels, this can not only exaggerate the unfolding situation but also unintentionally turn it into misinformation, diverting attention from the real problems.
Oh, assistant professor of information systems, believes authorities or organisations involved in a disaster or terrorist attack need to set up an emergency communication centre to provide speedy, relevant information on the unfolding crisis and confirm or dispel misinformation circulating on social media.
The study, the first application of rumour theory to social media and community intelligence, analyses three large Twitter data sets:
• The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, where a group of gunmen killed 165 and injured 304 people;
• The May 2012 shooting of five people by a gunman in Seattle; and
• Toyota’s recall of four million cars in 2009 and 2010 because of potential “sticking” accelerator pedals and floor mat entrapment.
Within minutes of the initial terrorist attack in Mumbai, a local resident posted a stream of pictures on photo sharing website Flickr. Almost concurrently, a group of people voluntarily formed a Twitter page with a link to the Flickr site and spread eyewitness accounts of the terrorist attacks with texts, photos and links to other sources.
While the flurry of social media activity had many positive outcomes, enabling people to contact family members, encouraging blood donations and providing eyewitness accounts, it also caused many rumours to circulate.
In total 20,920 tweets were analysed on the Mumbai attacks in the study, ‘Community Intelligence and Social Media Services: A Rumor Theoretic Analysis of Tweets During Social Crisis,’ published in MIS Quarterly – from the moment the terror attack occurred on November 26 until November 30.
“Natural disasters and crises such as terrorist attacks provide the optimum conditions for rumours to spread, which can exacerbate the situation for emergency response operations and cause panic amongst the public,” noted Oh. “For example, during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the police control room was flooded with incorrect reports of explosions at leading hotels.
“Misinformation on the Internet was also influencing what was being reported on official news channels. In fact, the British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to admit it had made a mistake after using Twitter coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks as a source of official news.”
Oh believes the main motivation for people turning to Twitter in a crisis is to find out what is happening in their immediate area or to acquaintances. To control the flow of misinformation, emergency communication centres need to be set up quickly to respond to misinformation through social media channels.
“People use mainstream media to try to make sense of the situation but it usually provides general information or repeatedly broadcasts a few sensational scenes over and over again,” said Oh, who cites the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Rumour Control Centre web site during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as an example of one way to use emergency communication centres.
“What people involved in the crisis really want is very localised information in real time to aid their decision-making,” Oh concludes. “Hence they rapidly realise that mainstream media do not provide them with local information that they desperately need to overcome the extreme situation, hence, they turn to social media such as Casebook and Twitter.
“Emergency response teams need to put in place prompt emergency communication systems to refute the misinformation and provide citizens with timely, localised and correct information through multiple communication channels such as web site links, social network web sites, RSS, email, text message, radio, TV or retweets.
“In cases of community disasters, emergency responders need to make extra effort to distribute reliable information and, at the same time, control collective anxiety in the community to suppress the spreading of unintended rumour information. This includes the setting up of an ’emergency communication centre’ in the local community to monitor social media very closely and respond rapidly to unverified and incorrect rumour information.
“Given that the motivation of rumouring is fundamental to making sense of uncertain situations such that people can deal with a possible threat, the provision of timely and certain information may lead to successful crisis management in partnership with voluntary online citizens.”
Bio
Ashley Potter is the Press and PR officer at the Warwick Business School, part of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. Contact her at ashley.potter@wbs.ac.uk to obtain a copy of the study.
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