Crowdsourcing Investigations

Abstract

In this paper the authors illustrate the ethical dilemmas that arise when large public investigations in a crisis are crowdsourced. The authors focus the variations in public opinion concerning the actions of two online groups during the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing. These groups collected and organized relief for victims, collected photos and videos taken of the bombing scene and created online mechanisms for the sharing and analysis of images collected online. They also used their large numbers and the affordances of the Internet to produce an answer to the question, “who was the perpetrator, and what kind of bomb was used?” The authors view their actions through public opinion, through sampling Twitter and applying a sentiment analysis to this data. They use this tool to pinpoint moments during the crisis investigation when the public became either more positively or negatively inclined toward the actions of the online publics. The authors use this as a surrogate, or proxy, for social approval or disapproval of their actions, which exposes large swings in public emotion as ethical lines are crossed by online publics.

The Technology Crisis in US-based Emergency Management: Toward a Well-Connected Future

“…Local blogs, The Boston Globe, and civic-oriented software helped to identify where official and unofficial shelters could be found [40,41]. The second action was to help investigators comb through petabytes of text-based tips, images, and movies in or around the areas of detonation [43][44][45]. Here, the online communities that participated first action engaged the data created by those near the finish line at the request of the FBI [43,46].…”

Crisis-Related Apps

“…Ivarsson (2015) also emphasized the significance of the involvement of the public for crisis communication. Tapia and LaLone (2014) indicated the use of social media communication in the context of the Boston Marathon Bombing. Other studies emphasized a consideration of volunteers through social media, because in crises people tend to help each other and need to be coordinated (Condon & Robinson, 2014;Purohit et al, 2014;Van Gorp, 2014).…”

Harnessing social and collaborative tools in digital disaster response work: Implications for design and practice

“…In particular, studies that examined the appropriation of technologies by citizens, public and private organisations and agencies mostly focused on understanding the appropriation of specific tools, or exploring the process and developing techniques, systems or heuristics (Palen, Hiltz and Liu, 2007;Starbird and Palen, 2011). On the other hand, the literature on the appropriation of collaborative platforms by spontaneous volunteers focused mostly on understanding their self-organisation, information sharing, social behaviours and information quality concern (Starbird and Palen, 2010;Tapia, LaLone and Kim, 2014;Peters and de Albuquerque, 2015). Lastly, studies on established digital volunteer communities, revolve around studying their work practice, evaluating existing platforms, and designing and developing tools and platforms to support their activities (Gupta et al, 2014;Ludwig et al, 2015).…”