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Highlights Centrally managed digital communication and service platforms simultaneously disrupt and destroy what we trust in and value. Digital destruction creates dissonant mental models. Shared situational awareness for crisis management relies on aligned mental models. Dissonant mental models produce conflicting situational awareness and poor crisis management. Analytics and artificial intelligence research should focus on identification of trusted information sources for mental model realignment.

In recent times societal crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak have given rise to a tension between formal ‘command and control’ and informal social media activated self-organising information and communication systems that are utilised for crisis management decision-making. Social media distrust affects the dissemination of disaster information as it entails shifts in media perception and participation but also changes in the way individuals and organisations make sense of information in critical situations. So far, a little considered notion in this domain is the concept of sense-giving. Originating from organisational theory, it is used to explain the mechanisms behind intentional information provision that fosters collective meaning creation. In our study, we seek to understand the potential impact of sense-giving from Twitter crisis communication generated during the Hurricane Harvey disaster event. Social network and content analyses performed with a dataset of 9,414,463 tweets yielded insights into how sense-giving occurs during a large-scale disaster event. Theoretically, we specified (1) perpetual sense-giving, which relies primarily on topical authority and frequency; as well as (2) intermittent sense-giving, which occurs from high value of message content and leverage of popularity, that is, retweets. Our findings emphasise the importance of information-rich actors in communication networks and the leverage of their influence in crises such as coronavirus disease 2019 to reduce social media distrust and facilitate sense-making.

During an extreme event, individuals use social media to communicate, self‐organize, manage, and mitigate risks (crisis‐related communications) but also to make sense of the event (commentary‐related communications). This study focuses on commentary‐based social media communication practices of Twitter users to understand the processes and patterns of inter‐subjective sense‐making during an extreme event. We analyse Twitter communication generated during three events: The Sydney Lindt Café Siege (2014), the Germanwings plane crash (2015), and the Brussels Terror Attacks (2016). We focus on the (i) communication structure, (ii) emotionality of the content via sentiment analyses, and (iii) influence of Twitter users on communications via social network analyses. We identified differences in the communication structures between the three events, which suggests a research agenda focussed on inter‐subjective sense‐making through the use of social media platforms, would make a significant contribution to knowledge about social media adoption and use in extreme events.

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