Public Response to Alerts and Warnings Using Social Media Report of a Workshop on Current Knowledge and Research Gaps (2013) / Chapter Skim
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3 Dynamics of Social Media
3 Dynamics of Social Media
Pages 22-33
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Melissa Elliott, Standby Task Force, discussed the dynamics of social media during a crisis, drawing on experience with volunteer efforts to use social media for disaster management. STUDYING TWITTER USE TO UNDERSTAND HOW PEOPLE COMMUNICATE In the United States, hundreds of millions of people interact with media sources and each other via social media, making the number of nodes and connections in an entire social media network incredibly large.
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that used a subset of Twitter user information and updates.1 Media research has tended to focus on two types of communication -- individual organizations broadcasting to large, undifferentiated audiences, and individuals communicating with each other -- but generally has not looked at anything that happens between these two extremes. Although most people think of Twitter as a social network, it can also be viewed as a full-spectrum media ecosystem.2 Twitter communications cover the spectrum between the two types of communication traditionally examined by media research; individuals as well as traditional mass media outlets are able to broadcast information.
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Approximately half of this information reaches users indirectly. A lot of information did not come directly from the media source but instead indirectly through other accounts, which were labeled opinion leaders by researchers.
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The first contest, the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, offered a $40,000 prize to the first team to find red weather balloons placed in 10 undisclosed locations in the continental United States. A key design issue facing the teams, according to Cebrian, was how to recruit participants.
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Initially the false locations were simply random, but later it became clear that some of the spoofing was being coordinated to provide multiple reports of the same location. The MIT team developed several techniques to filter out the false reports.
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Ultimately, the MIT team was able to win because it had a small number of highly motivated participants who physically visited sites to visually confirm the presence of a red balloon. Several questions arose from the challenges presented by intentional misinformation, and in an attempt to test a set of related hypotheses, the same research team attempted to design the incentive network for the next DARPA challenge in a similar way.
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Searching for a single balloon has no impact on the search for a second balloon; however, in the puzzle challenge, each step built on a previous step, and the usefulness of crowdsourcing appears to have degraded. STANDBY TASK FORCE: VOLUNTEER NETWORKS DURING DISASTERS Melissa Elliott is a core team member of the Standby Task Force and is also a member of both Crisis Mappers and Crisis Commons.
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In response, the Standby Task Force was launched at the 2010 International Conference of Crisis Mappers in Boston. The purpose of the task force was twofold: to provide predictable crisis-mapping support to humanitarian organizations and to create a model for volunteer engagement according to a set of processes so as to maximize efficiencies and minimize redundancies.
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In addition, if an individual submits several erroneous reports, he or she is able to receive additional training immediately. Sharing the burden of ensuring correct information creates another avenue for giving ownership to the crowd for that information and continues to reinforce a need to mentor and help others who may submit data incorrectly.
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However, volunteers do suffer from the emotional and mental impacts of disaster volunteer work, and further research is needed to determine how prevalent PTSD might be, how it can be prevented, and how organizations can monitor their volunteers for it. The Standby Task Force has also learned, reported Elliot, that it is important to continually provide feedback on how data generated by volunteers is being used.
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OBSERVATIONS OF WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Observations on the dynamics of social media offered by workshop panelists and participants in the discussion that followed the panel session included the following: • Comparing the dynamics of social media use during non- emergency situations with those of emergency situations can be incredibly complicated. Each emergency situation involves unique factors that affect how social dynamics develop.
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DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL MEDIA 33 Wikipedia became popular, this flat organization no longer worked, and a hierarchy of editors was created who could lock articles and exclude certain edits. But creating this sort of hierarchical system during a crisis would be quite difficult, given the time constraints of disasters and crises, which provides an incentive to be as open as possible.
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