The Public Uses Social Networking During Disasters to Verify Facts, Coordinate Information (Analysis, Social Media Package Part 1 of 2)

This article was adapted from a presentation by Jeannette Sutton at the 2009 World Conference of Disaster Management.

We know a lot about how people react in disasters, and emergency managers can draw on that knowledge and background. For example, we know how people communicate in disasters, and we know how to build effective warning systems so failures are designed out. We know how to develop messages that most directly impact people so they will take protective action. And we know how to craft preparedness campaigns to help people prepare for disasters. But can we take what we know and apply it to the use of social media in disasters? To answer this, I draw from research on three cases: the Virginia Tech shooting, Southern California wildfires of 2007 and Democratic National Convention of 2008.

In the immediate aftermath of Virginia Tech School shooting that occurred on April 16, 2007, my colleague Leysia Palen, who is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado, and I sent two graduate students to Blacksburg, Va., to investigate how people were sharing information, what tools they were using, and from what sources they were receiving their information. When the graduate students returned from the field after talking with students, faculty and community members, we started gathering data online to learn how that community was using social media.

We focused on Facebook. We archived a number of different groups on Facebook that emerged around issues of information sharing and condolences related to the school shooting, and ones that had the largest numbers of participants. And then we looked at the conversations between people.

What was most interesting about the ways that students and others were using Facebook during this event was how coordinated the information sharing was and how people were so instrumental in bringing together knowledge from different parts of the United States to answer a particular question: who were the deceased.

Late in the morning of the Virginia Tech shooting, the university announced that there were a number of deaths. It initially didn't identify how many there were. But students immediately began identifying people that they knew had been killed, and posted that information to various Facebook groups. By the late afternoon, the university announced there were 32 deaths. At that point, we observed students and others on Facebook ramp up their investigation and sharing of information to the point that by the next day, within 24 hours, they had identified all 32 victims before the university officially released the names of those who had been killed.

This is an amazing feat. They used their informal networks to identify the names of all of those students who had been killed. This does raise the question about whether or not this information should be shared on an open platform like Facebook. But the power of collective intelligence that we observed through Facebook showed that there is a great deal of power in these distributed networks and that wisdom can rise up through the crowd.

What's also really important about this is that in the lists that we looked at, we never saw a wrong name listed. And there was turn taking: Every time someone listed a death, they had to verify how they knew the information. This certainly lends some credibility to the ways that people are sharing information.

Where People Turn

The Southern California wildfires of 2007 led to the evacuation of much of San Diego. During this disaster, I was working with Palen and Irina Shklovski, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Irvine. During the disaster, Shklovski went to evacuation sites to ask people how they were sharing information and what information was most valuable to them.

After the evacuation orders were lifted, we quickly developed an online survey to draw