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Earthquake social media response

Posted by Martin Anderson CFA Member
Wednesday, 20 June 2012

The power of social media to provide situational awareness and community information was highlighted again after Tuesday's earthquake that affected a large area of Victoria.

In the first two minutes after the tremor 100 tweets were posted by people in various locations from Mitcham to Moe.

Initial social media posts suggested the quake was strong but had not caused any serious damage.

As part of the agreed Victorian emergency service social media protocol, the lead agency, VICSES, led the official social media response posting regular updates and advice on their Facebook page.

Those updates were shared by Victoria Police and CFA on their respective social media platforms along with other agency-specific updates.

For example, due to a flood of non-emergency calls to "000" Victoria Police asked people only to phone in an emergency.

CFA was also able to identify and dispel rumours that the earthquake had caused an explosion and fire at the Australian Paper Mill, near Traralgon.

Updates on the CFA Facebook page were viewed 80,121 times in the hours after the quake and Tweets on the CFA_Updates Twitter account reached 22,685 people, including many journalists who were reporting what was being said on social media.

CFA, in collaboration with other Victorian emergency agencies, has been exploring ways of filtering and verifying the massive amounts of community information that is now available on social media during emergencies.

Location:
General
Categories:
Incidents - Other
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Last modified on Thursday, 21 June 2012 00:17
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Lachlan Leatham
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written by Lachlan Leatham, June 21, 2012
The amount of misinformation that was floating around proved that while social media can be an asset to share information, not all of the information (or sources) can be trusted..
Personally I'm glad to have the ability to mute hashtags or just log off all together in time like this.

Social media is far from the golden egg some claim it to be.
Martin Anderson
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written by Martin Anderson, June 21, 2012
Apart from the Australian Paper Mill rumour there was very little evidence of misinformation.

There was a high "signal to noise" ratio - ie a lot of irrelevant (from an emergency management point of view) tweets. This was partly due to the fact that no serious damage had been done and therefore the Melbourne / Aussie humour kicked in and there were a lot of "funny" posts and pics of fallen over garden chairs etc. :-)

The challenge for emergency managers is to filter and assess the masses of "data" that is posted to social media during emergencies and then amplify the signal (the useful stuff) to try to drown out the noise (the irrelevant / incorrect).

A lot of great work has already been done in this area by the likes of CSIRO and other researchers around the world.

For anyone who is overwhlemed by the signal / noise ratio, like yourself Lachalan, I would recommend just following the official agency accounts and let us do the work for you ;-) If people are unaware of the official accounts or which agencies are leading the social media response they can search the relevant hashtags to identify the appropriate official accounts.

I don't know anyone who works in emergency management who argues that social media is a "golden egg" - it's already a very useful tool in our communications toolkit and promises to become even more important in the future as research on managing the social media data continues but it is not a "magic wand", "silver bullet", or "golden egg" - the vast majority of people who talk about that are those who take a negative position towards social media. ;-)
Lachlan Leatham
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written by Lachlan Leatham, June 21, 2012
Are you kidding? There were claims of the magnatude being anywhere from 3.6 to 6.7 and the epicenter being as far away as central NSW, depth was even as shallow as 2km according to some people. Information is useless if the details are wrong.

This is not to mention some major media outlets and third party operators that have the sole purpose of providing information and alerting people to incidents like this publishing (in and outside of social media) said misinformation and in some cases even information from fake accounts that blatantly posted false details as an act of humour.

I feel sorry for anyone that blindly trusts social media as a (credible) source of information.
Martin Anderson
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written by Martin Anderson, June 21, 2012
Yes Lachlan - I would strongly recommend that you don't blindly trust any source of information.

Using basic crowdsourcing techniques combined with a little bit of common sense it was relatively easy to identify reliable & credible information from social media on Tuesday evening.

If you're the sort of person who believes everything you hear or read then perhaps social media isn't for you smilies/wink.gif

If you're genuinely interested in exploring the clear opportunities and benefits that social media & crowdsourcing can provide emergency managers then you might want to check out the following link: http://irevolution.net/2011/06...orensics/
Lachlan Leatham
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written by Lachlan Leatham, June 21, 2012
My problem isn't that I can't differentiate between what information I need to filter and what I need to pay attention to.

My problem is media outlets like the ABC or sites like Incident Alert which people do look to for accurate information providing inaccuracies that people who don't filter information or check sources will take as correct. It wasn't much of an issue with a non event like the earthquake but imagine the problems it could cause if it was information people were relying on in a different situation and don't be fooled, no matter how much you tell people otherwise people will rely on information given by allegedly credible sources even on social media.
This is proved by a lack of common sense shown by many who use social media.

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