Write a 2 to 3 page summary of the paper.

O R I G I N A L P A P E R

Social Media in Disaster Risk Reduction and Crisis Management

David E. Alexander

Received: 24 April 2013 / Accepted: 27 November 2013 / Published online: 4 December 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This paper reviews the actual and potential use of social media in emergency, disaster and crisis situations. This is a field that has generated intense

interest. It is characterised by a burgeoning but small and very recent literature. In

the emergencies field, social media (blogs, messaging, sites such as Facebook, wikis

and so on) are used in seven different ways: listening to public debate, monitoring

situations, extending emergency response and management, crowd-sourcing and

collaborative development, creating social cohesion, furthering causes (including

charitable donation) and enhancing research. Appreciation of the positive side of

social media is balanced by their potential for negative developments, such as

disseminating rumours, undermining authority and promoting terrorist acts. This

leads to an examination of the ethics of social media usage in crisis situations.

Despite some clearly identifiable risks, for example regarding the violation of pri-

vacy, it appears that public consensus on ethics will tend to override unscrupulous

attempts to subvert the media. Moreover, social media are a robust means of

exposing corruption and malpractice. In synthesis, the widespread adoption and use

of social media by members of the public throughout the world heralds a new age in

which it is imperative that emergency managers adapt their working practices to the

challenge and potential of this development. At the same time, they must heed the

ethical warnings and ensure that social media are not abused or misused when crises

and emergencies occur.

Keywords Social media � Disasters � Emergency management � Ethics � Twitter � Facebook

D. E. Alexander (&) Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, Gower Street,

London WC1E 6BT, UK

e-mail: david.alexander@ucl.ac.uk

123

Sci Eng Ethics (2014) 20:717–733

DOI 10.1007/s11948-013-9502-z

Introduction and Definitions

At 09:02, local time, on 29th May 2012, a damaging earthquake struck Emilia-

Romagna and Lombardy regions of northern Italy. This was the second major

seismic event to affect the area in 10 days. It killed 17 people and caused extensive

damage to 40 municipalities. Within 50 minutes a clear and relatively comprehen-

sive picture of the earthquake and some of its most important impacts was available.

It could be consulted via the Internet from almost anywhere in the world. The

information presented was essentially accurate and the speed with which it became

available was largely a result of the use of social media to communicate from the

sites affected to places where data could be collected and presented to the public.

The term ‘social media’ embraces blogs, micro-blogs, social book-marking,

social networking, forums, collaborative creation of documents (via wikis 1 ) and the

sharing of audio, photographic and video files (Balana 2012). It is characterised by

interactive communication, in which message content is exchanged between

individuals, audiences, organisations and sectors of the general public.

Social media usage is, to some extent, negatively correlated with age and

positively with educational attainment. For example, people over the age of 55 tend

to prefer conventional sources of news. The degree of adoption of social media

varies from country to country but is generally dynamic in most environments and

hence any summary statistics are liable to become outdated rapidly. Attempts to

relate social media to personality factors have suggested that they are most

attractive to people, of both sexes, who are relatively extrovert (Correa et al. 2010),

but there is no indication of the extent to which any effort to develop profiles of

users might be culturally conditioned. Information on gender differentiation is, at

best, fragmentary (Armstrong and McAdams 2009).

In the United States, the Internet is the most important source of information

for people under the age of 30. For other Americans, it is second only to

television (Krimsky 2007). Elsewhere, the use of ‘smart’ phones and social media

resources is increasing so rapidly that they are now a force to be reckoned with

throughout the world. Social media dispense with ‘‘information gatekeepers’’,

which include doctors giving on-line medical advice and journalists relating a

news story. These figures are replaced by apomediaries, in which network filtering

or group moderation are the only processes by which the spontaneous feed of

information is regulated—a matter of apomediation or disintermediation (Eysen-

bach 2008).

This paper offers a review of the use of social media in disasters and major

incidents. I consider both how citizens, emergency managers and first responders

make use of social media in crisis and how researchers perceive and characterise the

phenomenon. I examine seven ways in which social media are put to use for disaster

response, recovery and risk reduction. As social media have both beneficial and

potentially malign connotations, their advantages and drawbacks are discussed.

Next, I consider the ethical implications of social media in disaster, including the

1 The term ‘wiki’ is defined by the OED as ‘‘A type of web page designed so that its content can be edited

by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language.’’ It was apparently first used in 1995.

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risks and dilemmas of unregulated communication and the degree of inclusiveness

of new media. In order to end on a positive note, examples of successes with social

media in disaster are briefly discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn, but

these must necessarily be provisional, as the field is in the early stages of rapid

evolution in relation to both technological development and social acceptance.

The Research Literature

The research literature on social networking and social media in disasters and crises

is still quite limited. Moreover, it focuses on the short-term aspects of emergency

response and rapid recovery. It is understandable that there are as yet no studies of

the longer term, both because social media are a relatively new phenomenon and

because the research is also new. Although ‘new media’, such as the Internet, have

received attention from academics for a decade or more, very little of the research

on social networking predates 2007. However, there is a trend towards a rapid

increase in the number of papers that have been published. In this context, the

literature on ‘social media’ needs to be differentiated from that on the social aspects

of mass media, which is a much wider field that embraces more conventional and

long-standing forms of dissemination of information, such as radio and television

(Quarantelli 1989).

Studies of social media in disasters have been conducted as part of a general

tendency to examine the functioning of social interaction by means of the Internet

and mobile devices (Krimsky 2007). Both sets of literature concentrate mainly on

specific themes, which are:

• how social networks function and how they are used • how to build and utilise algorithms either to enhance social networking or to

monitor it

• the extent to which people use social networks, how they perceive them and what their communication preferences are

• the penetration of devices such as ‘smart’ mobile telephones and the extent to which these provide people with access to social media.

In addition, students of risk, crisis and disaster have studied:

• how social media are used in crises • the views and opinions of emergency managers and journalists regarding social

media and the extent to which the new media are integrated with more

traditional means of communication

• how social media interact with the traditional sources of information.

There is a broad distinction between studies of the technical and social aspects of

new media. The creation of new platforms and algorithms characterises the former

(Cheong and Lee 2010; White and Plotnik 2010), while studies of the kinds of usage

and messages sent relate to the latter (Hughes and Palen 2009; Lindsay 2011). The

technical side includes by studies of the rate and modality of diffusion of messages

(Song and Yan 2012).

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While researchers work to develop software for the efficient dissemination of

messages via social networks during crisis situations (e.g. Plotnick et al. 2009),

Reuter et al. (2012) advocated a more systematic approach to the use of social

networking software in crisis situations, starting with classification of uses and

potentials.

Researchers are equivocal about the balance between the advantages and

drawbacks of social media (see below), but they are united in identifying the uses to

which the media can be put. Social media promote cross-platform accessibility and a

constant flow of information. Situational updates can be complemented by

geographical and locational data (Vieweg et al. 2010). Just-in-time information

can be provided on how to cope with developing situations. Moreover, social media

provide a framework for the work of journalists and for public discussion and debate.

Social Media in Disaster and Crisis

The following are some of the ways in which social media can be used in disaster

risk reduction and crisis response.

1. A listening function. Social media are able to give a voice to people who do not

normally have one. They also enable a remarkably democratic form of

participation in public debate and facilitate the exchange of information and

points of view. During an emergency, through their tendency to coalesce

opinions (or stimulate monetary donations), social media are capable of

revealing some aspects of the mental and emotional state of a nation. This may

seem a rather exaggerated claim, but it should be noted that Quarantelli (1997)

argued that the advent of modern information and communications technology

involves changes that are as profound as those that occurred after the invention

of printing. These changes do, or soon will, affect directly the majority of the

population and the rest indirectly.

The listening function involves constantly or periodically sampling the varied

output of social media. This enables currents of popular opinion and public

preference to be gauged. It may also indicate how the public is behaving and

reacting to events. Crawford (2009) classified online listening into three categories:

background listening, reciprocal listening and delegated listening by corporations.

Crawford defined background listening as mere tuning in, a minimal form of

engagement. Reciprocal listening involves two-way exchange of messages, with

mutual sensitivity to their content and implications; and delegated listening is a

form of ‘‘arm’s length engagement’’, in which messages are monitored and

responded to, if at all, en masse. Hence, listening is a question of keeping track of

opinions, giving advice or collecting information that is of interest to corporations.

As Crawford (2009, p. 526) noted, ‘‘there has been a glorification of ‘voice’ as the

prime form of participation online.’’

2. Monitoring a situation. Whereas the listening function involves the passive

collection of information, monitoring is conducted in order to improve reactions

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to events and better to manage the general public by learning what people are

thinking and doing. Current research (Bird et al. 2012) suggests that harmful

and inaccurate rumours are not particularly enhanced by the use of social

media. One reason for this is that, with mass participation, the false rumours

that do begin to circulate are easily corrected by knowledgeable people. Hence,

in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, there

was little indication that the massive use of social media by the Japanese public

led to the successful propagation of rumour and wildly incorrect information

(Hjorth and Kim 2011). Moreover, Stirratt (2011) found that, in the Japan

disaster, 49 % of Twitter messages were either positive or somewhat positive in

their attitude to emergency preparedness and only 7 % were negative.

Floods in Queensland, Australia, led to extensive use of social media for public

interaction and communication, but not for the mass propagation of false

information. Bird et al. (2012, pp. 30–31) noted that: ‘‘While rumours were

common at the height of the disaster, respondents reported that the moderators of

the Facebook pages were prompt at confirming information and providing official

sources when available.’’ Hence, despite the presence of a major crisis—the

floods—the use of social media did not lead to a situation of general anarchy that

was out of control.

3. Integration of social media into emergency planning and crisis management. In

a questionnaire survey (Barr 2011), it was found that 80 % of US general public

and 69 % of online users felt that it would be beneficial for national emergency

response organisers to monitor social networking sites regularly. However, in

most places this has not happened. Agencies are afraid that social networks will

produce inaccurate information of dubious provenance (Goolsby 2010).

Moreover, the full integration of social networks into disaster management

would require many of them to change their working practices, as, in the words

of Palen et al. (2007), ‘‘command-and-control models do not easily adapt to the

expanding data-generating and data-seeking activities by the public.’’ None-

theless, there is immense potential to make data dissemination a two-way

process, in which information is both received from the public and fed to it

(Crowe 2012; Jennex 2012a; Sykes and Travis 2012).

The assertion that command and control may be at odds with social media

deserves further elaboration. I have argued elsewhere (Alexander 2008) that there is

a continuum between command-based and collaborative models of emergency

management. The command end of the spectrum tends to be authoritarian, and to

divide competencies by level of command into strategic, tactical and operational.

The collaborative end of the spectrum tends to divide competencies by theme, such

as communication, logistics, and shelter. As there is no clear hierarchical structure

in social media, they fit much better into a collaborative model than a command one.

Present experience suggests (Yates and Paquette 2011) that issuing orders to the

general public is likely to generate an adverse reaction on social media, whereas

issuing requests for collaboration may elicit a more positive response, based on

involvement rather than alienation. Moreover, the thematic organisation of

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collaborative models of emergency management favour collective information

sharing on tasks, topics and sectors.

Hughes and Palen (2012) observed that the strict bureaucratic nature of

emergency management systems, such as the US NIMS, is at variance with the open

system and free access character of the social media of which emergency managers

are being exhorted to make use. However, the direct, person to person nature of

social media is a boon to public information officers, as it helps them avoid the

common pitfall of being misquoted by the official media. Moreover, citizens are

widely recognised to be the real first responders after disaster (Helsloot and

Ruitenberg 2004): they hold the key to the use of social media as an extension of

emergency management. Rarely are emergency management organisations ready to

utilise such developments. As Westbrook et al. (2012, p. 2) observed, ‘‘The

community, volunteer organizations, and news organizations are currently embrac-

ing social media, but EM is slow to adopt and implement it on a full scale.’’ There

are demonstrable benefits from doing so. For example, Vihalemm et al. (2012)

found that social media can help citizens receive, understand and cope emotionally

with warning messages.

Yet there is an imperative to act: the public can now share information and

disseminate critical news to the world and each other without going through

government communication methods. This is revolutionizing the way in which

people seek help and the way first responders and managers receive and exchange

information. The very structure of communication and information sharing

dynamics is changing for both for emergency managers and the public. As the

Director of the US. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Craig Fugate, stated

in a Senate Homeland Security Hearing in 2011, one of the social elements that is

changing in the field of emergency management is the way the public can now be

viewed ‘‘as a resource and not a liability.’’ For example, social media can be used to

deliver warnings to users. In the most sophisticated cases, these may involve local

information in the form of maps and data, as well as instructions on what to do

during an impending crisis.

4. Crowd-sourcing and collaborative development. In most disasters, the first

responders are the public. Moreover, social capital is involved in the form of

the mobilisation of skills, leadership, networks, support systems, and so on

(Dufty 2012). This involves the concept that social networks and interaction

between people increase productivity and lend added value to outcomes. The

social networks benefit from the particular skills of their members. One aspect

of the formation of social capital through social media is crowd-sourcing. For

example, Ushahidi is the name of a crowd-sourced crisis mapping platform

(www.ushahidi.com—Gao et al. 2011a). Sahana, and its derivatives Eden,

Vesuvius and Mayon, are open source disaster management systems. These

initiatives rely on spontaneous contributions to make them work. This endows

them with positive feedback, in that the more they are used, the more popular

they become and the more they encourage users to contribute to them. Ushahidi

and Sahana are examples of the use of social media to create and disseminate

methods and good practices, and to form social capital. They are open-source,

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free-access platforms that can be used and modified by anyone. In this respect,

they are particularly useful for places where disaster management and response

are poorly developed and resources are scarce.

In crowd-sourcing, it is suggested that 1 % of the crowd will create content, 10 %

will validate it and 89 % will use it (Goolsby 2010). However, this is sufficient to

maintain a constant flux of information and a high level of consultation of the sites

built upon crowd-sourcing. The drawbacks are that crowd-sourcing lacks a common

mechanism to facilitate coordination between organisations, it lacks security

features, and it does not necessarily provide the information that is most needed or

most accurate (Hammon and Hippner 2012). Nevertheless, crisis mapping is

particularly suited to crowd-sourcing through the use of social networks, in that

reports can be received from many users, and compiled into the resultant maps,

which can be widely disseminated. Maps can depict survivors’ temporary settlement

camps, resource distribution sources, accessible roads, impacted areas, and so on. In

the words of one researcher (Goolsby 2009), crowd-sourcing creates a sort of ‘‘open

intranet’’ in relation to the Internet, or in other words a community of users.

5. Creating social cohesion and promoting therapeutic initiatives. Social media

can be used to make people feel part of particular initiatives. They can foster a

sense of identification with local or on-line communities. Researchers (e.g.

Taylor et al. 2012, p. 25) have noted that people caught up in disaster reported

feeling more supported and more optimistic about the future when social media

were extensively involved. Moreover, social media can be used to enhance

voluntarism by increasing the profile and connectedness of voluntary organ-

isations. In this way, they can have a positive impact on the esprit de corps of

the members.

An American Red Cross survey of social media usage was carried out in 2010

(Blanchard et al. 2010). It indicated that 24 % of the US population and 31 % of the

online population would use the media to tell family and friends they are safe. This

reflects both the utility of social media and a well-founded lack of confidence in

means of communication such as direct telephone calls, which are subject to

network saturation.

6. The furtherance of causes. Social media such as Twitter can be used to launch

an appeal for donations. With respect to the 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster,

Lobb et al. (2012) found that television had a much greater impact in this

respect, but nevertheless a Twitter appeal did elicit a considerable response

from public donors. Gao et al. (2011b) found that In 48 hours the American Red

Cross received $8 million in donations merely from text messages. Lobb et al.

(2012) observed a rapid rise in donations straight after the disaster, when news

coverage was maintained at a high level, and then a gradual, persistent decline

as coverage dwindled and disappeared.

7. Research. The understanding of social reactions to stress, risk and disaster can

be enhanced by the use of social media. This represents a challenge to

researchers, who are struggling to create what one of them has called a ‘‘digital

ethnography’’ (Murthy 2011a). Some authors (e.g. Castillo et al. 2011) have

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chronicled the move towards automatic credibility analysis. Others have

compared activity on social media sites with the timeline of events in the field

(Chung 2011).

The Negative Side of Social Media

Reported above are seven ways in which social media are useful and through which

they show promise for development in the fields of disaster response and resiliency.

However, they do have a darker side (Chung 2011; CSS-ETH 2013). Rumour

propagation is not to be ruled out, nor is the dissemination of false or misleading

information, whether this is done inadvertently or deliberately. Anyone who doubts

the power of Internet-based information to disseminate false information should

type the words ‘‘earthquake prediction’’ into a search engine. The resulting sites are

a mixture of those that purvey dispassionate scientific information and those that are

based on highly debatable, perhaps utterly unscientific, premises and methodolo-

gies. Yet the sites run by charlatans often have the same visual impact, and thus

superficial legitimacy, as the authoritative scientific sites (Flanagin and Metzger

2007). Worse still, potentially social media can be used to orchestrate crime,

depending on the strength or weakness of any function that arises, probably quite

spontaneously, to ‘‘self-police’’ their output (Goolsby 2010).

Castillo et al. (2011, p. 675) observed that ‘‘immediately after the 2010

earthquake in Chile, when information from official sources was scarce, several

rumours posted and re-posted on Twitter contributed to increase the sense of chaos

and insecurity in the local population.’’ This contradicts the rumour-quelling

propensity of social media recorded in Tokyo after the 2011 earthquake (Bird et al.

2012). Castillo et al. (2011) also found that people had more faith in traditional

media, and headlines on Twitter were regarded as less credible. Twitter was seen as

a tool for political and commercial propaganda. Moreover, these authors found that

outbursts of public sentiment correlated with unreliability in Twitter messages.

They attributed some of the drawbacks of Twitter to the disconnection between on-

line messages and the reality on the ground, which the message writers had

difficulty in assessing properly.

One event in mid-2013 illustrates the negative effect that social media can have

during a major incident. In the night of 4 May 2013 a freight train derailed at

Wetteren near the Belgian city of Ghent, releasing acrylonitrile gas in an explosion

and toxic cloud. Concentrations of the gas reached 600 parts per million, which is

6–8 times the lethal dose. One person died and 93 were injured by the fumes. As the

area that was affected is densely urbanised, many aspects of this major incident

were shared on social media. However, according to the commander of the Ghent

Fire Brigade (GFB), Mr Christian van de Voorde [personal communication], much

of the information being put about by the general public was wildly inaccurate.

Unfortunately, the situation on the ground remained unstable for more than a week

and, during this time, GFB was not able to gather accurate information with which

to counteract rumours and exaggerations. In this respect, the impact of social media

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on the public image of the incident was decidedly negative because it remained

distorted, inaccurate and alarmist. When a situation is simpler and more easily

interpretable, one may be able to rely on self-policing of social media by users who

are concerned to get the facts right, but when the true facts are, on the instant,

unobtainable or in dispute, that cannot be the case.

A further example is that of the massive surge in social media activity in the

aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which impacted the Atlantic coast of the United

States at the end of October 2012. There is no doubt that social media did provide

the opportunity for greatly enhanced exchange of information between the

authorities and the public and between members of the public, but not without

substantial costs (CSS-ETH 2013, p. 4). Photoshop-style image manipulation was

widely used by people who shared photographs of the storm. Exaggerated and false

news items, for example, about which places in New York City were flooded, were

shared and reposted by so many social media users that they were picked up by

mainstream media and thus began to assume the status of true stories until they

could be discounted by field checking.

Murthy (2011b, p. 11) noted that the very people who are most in need of support

may be those who have least access to and understanding of the technology that they

would need in order to participate in the social media revolution. But apart from the

basic digital divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, researchers have noted the

persistence of demarcations on the basis of race and class among users of the

technology and services.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in using social media is the sheer volume of

information involved. One researcher (Goolsby 2009, p. 3) commented that ‘‘finding

useful ‘tweets’ during a major event… is a little like panning for gold in a raging river.’’

According to Cheong and Lee (2011), ‘‘Twitter has been identified as both a

potential facilitator and also a powerful deterrent to terrorism.’’ Hence, there is

currently considerable ambiguity about whether social media exert a benign or a

malign influence on public safety and security. For example, although China is

known for its attempts to repress free usage of the Internet, there is an alternative

story. Denis-Remis et al. (2013) described how patriotic Chinese used social media

to orchestrate disruption of the activities of a French hypermarket company in China

because of anger at French Government policies towards Tibet. Once it had started,

the researchers saw the reaction as something that was impossible to stop, an

indication of the strength of positive feedback in the effects of messaging (Denis-

Remis et al. 2013, p. 53). This underlines the positive feedback inherent in social

media usage in a crisis, a phenomenon that can generate unstoppable, uncontrollable

developments with little regard to whether posterity will consider them positive or

negative.

Finally, when reviewing the potential drawbacks of social media, one should also

note the physical weaknesses. Writing about social media usage during a major

interruption of electricity supply to the southern Californian city of San Diego,

Jennex (2012b) noted that: ‘‘Ultimately the Great Southwest Blackout can be

considered a massive, unplanned, backup battery test.’’ Neither the users nor the

providers of sites and cellular communication to reach them were ready in any way

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for such an exigency. Tellingly, Jennex (2012b, pp. 4–5) concluded that ‘‘while the

functionality of social media is useful, the maturity of social media availability is

not sufficient to warrant including social media as operational crisis response

systems.’’ In other words, the potential is there, but much needs to be done in order

to realise it. This will require preparedness on both the technical and the social

fronts, from both suppliers and users of services.

One interesting question that deserves to be considered is whether the advantages

and disadvantages of social media with respect to disaster mitigation and response

are significantly different to those of traditional media. If one considers the case of

earthquake prediction, there is little indication that television, radio and newspapers

have behaved rationally, responsibly and within the bounds of scientific fact (see,

for example, Dearing and Kazmierczak 1993). Would social media have closed or

increased the gap between reporting and reality? It is too early to tell. However, the

idea of a message that ‘‘goes viral’’ and is thus picked up by millions of users, is

worrying. For example, the 30-min documentary film Kony 2012, about Joseph Rao

Kony, the Ugandan founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was viewed

almost 100 million times on YouTube, through which it reached more than half of

young adult Americans. Most of the people who saw it know no more about Kony

and the LRA than they found out in the film. However, it has been widely criticised

as being significantly inaccurate and misleading (Cavanagh 2012). This could easily

happen in disasters, and, in so doing, potentially widen the audience beyond those

who would have gained information from the traditional media. On the other hand,

the worldwide misinterpretation of the trial of seven officials after the Italian

L’Aquila earthquake of 2009 shows that the conventional media are just as capable

as social media of picking up a misleading story and vigorously propagating it

(Alexander in press b).

In synthesis, besides problems such as waning battery power, the use of social

media brings forth issues of trust and privacy. As Johnson et al. (2011) observed,

trust is asymmetric, personalised, dependent on context and potentially short-lived.

Moreover, privacy is an increasing concern that is shared by many users of social

media.

Ethics of Social Media Usage in Disaster

Students of social media have been quick to take note of potential ethical dilemmas.

The first to investigate this aspect were legal and medical researchers. For example,

the associations that represent medical personnel in the United States have

counselled against uninhibited use of social networking, as it can lead to conflicts of

interest, for example, when a doctor uses social media to befriend a patient. Decamp

(2013) noted that problems such as this are a legal minefield, and one that lawyers

have increasingly come to monitor in search of opportunities to litigate. Emergency

managers normally have to walk a tightrope between actions that may be deemed

excessive and any failure to respond adequately that could be considered negligence

(Alexander in press a). As McKee (2013, p. 3) observed, ‘‘The changing nature of

technology, as well as the relatively recent use of social media for research, means

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that ethical considerations will have to be reviewed regularly.’’ The same will be

true of protection against unwarranted official intrusions into personal privacy

(Nissenbaum 2004).

According to Nissenbaum (2004), privacy is subject to a set of norms about what

can be divulged and how that can happen, but the norms vary from one social

context to another. This is the theory of ‘contextual integrity’. Violation of the

norms amounts to a loss of privacy. Grodzinsky and Tavani (2010) noted that norms

established or respected by one participant, for example the author of a personal

blog, can easily be violated by the republication of material in a different context,

for example, a public blog.

As noted above, risks are associated with a largely unregulated Internet-based

system of public mass communication. In summary, the use of social media for

nefarious or malignant purposes could potentially include attempts to persecute

people or damage their reputations (Boggs and Edwards 2010), attempts to spread

malicious rumour, efforts to foment violent protest, and attempts to organise

terrorist activities. Lesser degrees of harm could involve invasion of privacy and

unauthorised dissemination of personal information. Moreover, any system of

disaster response or risk reduction that depends on social media for access to its

services risks excluding those people who lack access to the requisite means. No

amount of self-congratulation about the high levels of penetration of ‘smart’ mobile

telephony can obscure the fact that there are citizens who for reasons of poverty,

disability or choice do not possess the instruments in question and do not know how

to use them. Moreover, it is clear that the wealthier, younger, fitter and more aware a

person is, the more he or she is likely to be fully aware of the services available via

social media and its potential under different circumstances. ‘‘Computer illiteracy’’

is a form of disadvantage in a world that has become dependent on digital

communication for many services. It is only partially compensated for by the fact

that, by relaying information by word of mouth, other people will be able to help a

disadvantaged individual cope. However, total equality cannot be a sine qua non of

social media, as there will always be some level of social exclusion to hinder their

development.

If these problems become serious, critics will begin to argue that the democratic

function of social media is a mere illusion. Instead, we see the media as a means of

propagating and sustaining direct democracy, and of fostering participatory

governance in disaster risk reduction. In this respect, it should be borne in mind

that there is a difference between disseminating information and giving people

executive power on the basis of what is disseminated. Nevertheless, even the mere

propagation of information is empowering, to a certain extent.

The risk of concerted abuse of social media begs the question of whether they

should be more regulated, and if so, how could that be achieved? Regulation would

require an assessment of the potential seriousness of the problem, estimation of

whether measures to control social media are feasible, and a decision on whether the

measures are necessary and would help abate the problem.

Social media and the Internet constitute a truly open system, and one that has no

centre. As Brafman and Beckstrom (2006) noted in their book The Starfish and the

Spider, when such a system is under attack it tends to mutate into something that is

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even less centralised and even harder to control. Thus, attempts in the People’s

Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran to dictate what people can

access on the Internet are only partially successful: they slow down rather than stop

the dissemination of information. In the main, the question of how one polices a

leaderless organisation is largely unsolvable. Individuals can be tracked down and

arrested, sites can be taken down, services can be blocked or wound up, but others

will replace them.

The converse view is that social media are a good means of circumventing

corruption, mendacity, unwarranted control and excessive monitoring of people’s

activities. Moreover, we can view social media as a source of charity, solidarity and

hope. While we should beware of treating such a system as a nirvana of democracy,

while there is a good consensus among users about what is right and good, and what

is acceptable, self-policing will be active. Bad posts and unethical messages will be

censured by the users. In this respect, we can return to Charles Fritz’s (1961)

conception of disasters as the home of the ‘‘therapeutic community’’—cf. Alan

Barton’s ‘‘altruistic community’’ (Barton 1970) and Taylor’s ‘‘utopian feelings’’

(Taylor et al. 1970). In the immediate aftermath of a sudden-impact disaster, there

tends to be a greater consensus in the community on what is right, good and ethical

to think, say and do. Differences are put aside for the duration of the emergency, as

the community faces a large external threat, for example the destruction caused by

an earthquake, hurricane or flood. This is the period in which social media come

into their own as a source of communication and support. Hence, they can be said to

benefit from and reinforce the ‘‘therapeutic community’’, in a form of social

symbiosis.

One other aspect of the ethics of social media usage deserves to be examined

here. I have written elsewhere (Alexander in press b) of the ‘‘death of discretion’’ in

modern culture. In fact, wireless communication is part of a broad trend towards the

gradual abandonment of personal discretion and increasing tendency to share

intimate details. For example, people grieve in public far more than they did in the

early days of mass media. Social media facilitate mass participation in this process.

Those who go against the grain and pose grossly offensive messages in relation to

people’s grief at losses are likely to be pursued vigorously by the authorities, as the

level of outcry forces action to be taken. Social media can thus produce a very

robust consensus, but not an absolute one.

There is an ethical question about the misrepresentation of disaster, whether this

is deliberate, inadvertent or a combination of the two (Singer and Endreny 1994).

The first ‘‘modern disaster’’ was probably the famine and starvation that occurred in

the Biafran war of secession from Nigeria in 1967–1970. This was the first occasion

on which film footage of death and suffering in an African famine were shared with

the Western public in near real-time. However, the famine was not the result of

natural disaster or inability to produce food, as the television viewers believed, but

was a tactic of war, the result of blockades and military incompetency (Mayer

1969). Decades later, the Live Aid concerts and ensuing donation bonanzas

propagated the misconception that Ethiopians were incapable of responding to

catastrophic drought, when in reality they were the victims of forced migration,

which was practically sustained by the donation spree (Müller 2013). Theoretically,

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social media are able to correct the imbalances of perception, because realistic

reports are likely to arrive from the field. However, much depends on who takes

note of the reports and how they are mediated by social perception. For research,

this is largely uncharted territory.

One is prompted to ask whether there are any solutions to the ethical problems

that at least potentially, and in some cases demonstrably, beset social media usage in

disasters. In more general terms, high-profile cases of electronic media-based

‘‘stalking’’ and persecution, propagation of racism, endangerment of minors, threats

of violence and incitements to criminal activity have prompted the authorities of

various countries to discuss or adopt measures to take the offenders off line, track

them down and, where appropriate, prosecute them. With respect to deliberate

misuse of information in disasters, rarely have there been punitive measures with

regard to the traditional media, let alone social media. However, the trial of the

‘‘L’Aquila seven’’ (Alexander in press b) is a landmark case in which the misuse of

information given to the public was at the heart of the legal case. In that the

prosecution successfully demonstrated that the results of this were fatal for some

tens of recipients, the way has been opened for legal action on information that is

harmful through negligence or design.

Some Recent Successes in the Use of Social Media in Disasters

Despite the potential for negative uses of social media, there have already been some

success stories in their employment for disaster response and risk reduction. Social

networks have been used instantly and spontaneously to report health issues, such as

cholera in Haiti and dengue in Thailand and Indonesia (Resch et al. 2011). In Japan

after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, social media facilitated public alerts,

helped locate missing people and enabled mapping of different aspects of the

emergency (Hjorth and Kim 2011). Flash-flooding in January 2011 in Queensland

and Victoria, Australia, led to a six-fold increase in public accession to emergency

service Facebook sites, representing a huge increase in interest and support (Bird

et al. 2012). Researchers have developed an on-line monitoring tool to detect sharp

increases (‘bursts’) in the frequency of key words that appear on Twitter (Cheong and

Lee 2010). Furthermore, rumours and misuses of Twitter are being monitored by

researchers at the University of Indiana, via a website called Truthy (truthy.indi-

ana.edu). Lastly, the proliferation of crisis camps and their aggregations, crisis

commons, has started to promote the more systematic organisation of social media

for emergency response, on occasion using wikis (Blanchard et al. 2010).

Conclusion

The current situation regarding social media in disasters and risk reduction has been

summarised very well by Sutton et al. (2008, p. 7):

Our data suggest that social media support the influence of the existing public-

side information production and distribution. As a consequence of the growing

Social Media in Disaster Risk Reduction 729

123

utility of social media and the ubiquity of peer-to-peer communications, we

believe that a change in disaster management models will come about in spite

of any failure to formally recognize these widely distributed and often

strikingly well-organized information activities. However, we argue that

simply letting these inevitable changes take place would nevertheless result in

needless delay, conflict and missteps. Instead, we call for efforts by public

officials to actively consider how to align with peer-to-peer information

exchange and to develop new conceptualizations of the information produc-

tion and dissemination functions for disaster response.

In other words, the incorporation of social media into pre-existing emergency

management systems is inevitable, owing to the sheer weight of public usage of

such facilities. Moreover, as social networks can be two-way means of commu-

nication, they can mix popular and official information. In this optimistic view, the

citizenry is viewed as a powerful, self-organising and collectively intelligent force

(Gao et al. 2011b).

Lastly, it is notable that, after only a very few years of research, there are still

many aspects of social media usage in crisis that are not adequately understood. One

of these is the influence of gender on perception, attitudes and behaviour regarding

usage of the new media (Armstrong and McAdams 2009). If social media are to be

optimised as a means of communication during emergencies, such aspects will have

to be understood thoroughly.

In synthesis, social media offer immense potential for interaction with the public

and monitoring of the public’s concerns. They have greatly increased the scope,

volume and speed of information exchange. This has not occurred without risks,

mostly associated with the propagation of false or inaccurate information, and the

potential consequences if this takes place. However, mass participation tends to

rectify some of the inadequacies associated with the free and unregulated flow of

information. The future will probably see a rationalisation of the use of social media

and new methodologies for judging the public mood and the utility of information

supplied by the public. This will be a challenge that emergency planners and

managers must necessarily face.

One final point concerns the role of social media in the long periods dominated

either by protracted recovery from major disasters or by mitigation (disaster risk

reduction). Patient attempts will need to be made to incorporate social media into

these processes and during them the technological, cultural and social realities will

inevitably change. There is a strong need for institutions such as civil protection

services and emergency warning systems to be adapt to the changing reality of

social media, and also to ensure that they have robust plans to tackle any ethical

dilemmas that social media usage may produce in the future.

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