Trust, but verify: social media models for disaster management

Abstract

A lack of trust in the information exchanged via social media may significantly hinder decisionmaking 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.

Truth, trust, and civic duty: Cultural factors in citizens' perceptions of mobile phone apps and social media in disasters

“…Research into authorities‐to‐citizen communication, that is, alerting the general public about disaster risks and providing information about appropriate behaviour in the acute disaster situation as well as advice during the recovery phase, has found increasing usage of social media by disaster management authorities, but also identified shortcomings such as lack of expertise and lack of practical guidance (Plotnick & Hiltz, ). Research into citizen‐to‐authorities communication, that is, communication for integrating citizen‐generated content in disaster management, has highlighted the immense potential of crowdsourcing, such as the PetaJakarta project, which is mapping Twitter data for flood mitigation (Holderness & Turpin, ), but also issues of disaster managers' mistrust of user‐generated social media data (Mehta, Bruns, & Newton, ). Other studies in this area have conceptualized the use of citizens' activities on social media as “social sensors.” By monitoring the activity of eyewitnesses on social media and mobile phones traffic, an intensification can indicate that a disaster has occurred, thus enabling the fast detection of disasters such as earthquakes (Bossu et al, ).…”

A review of social media use during disaster response and recovery phases

“…Spam bots may saturate the data with information that is inaccurate or irrelevant [85]. With the right technology, mining software, and resources, a culture shift will be necessary to reframe social media posts as data that can be relevant and trusted [86].…”

Descriptive and visual summaries of disaster events using artificial intelligence techniques: case studies of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria

“…One of the important problems in social media is trustworthinesswhether information shared on social media is reliable or coming from an authentic person. Towards this direction, several studies have attempted to detect trustworthiness from disaster-related tweets or credible twitter users (Mehta, Bruns, and Newton 2017;Halse et al 2018;Pandey et al 2018). We acknowledge that finding such information is important due to the fact that crisis responders need to rely on that information in order to send aid workers and supplies to a disaster location.…”