Tweeting Under Fire

Disaster researcher Jeannette Sutton explores how ordinary people create their own media during crises.

Jesse Walker from the August/September 2009 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Sometimes you might see on those channels sort of a gallows humor. Making jokes about Porky Pig and Miss Piggy, that sort of thing. In the very early days, I saw some people making up all these conspiracy theories. Obama went down to Mexico, and two days later this Mexican official died, and was Obama carrying the disease? All these stories. That, I thought, was really interesting: just watching the evolution of the conversation.

reason: Did you see the hysteria and panic that was being reported?

Sutton: There’s a longstanding myth that’s perpetuated over and over again, in every disaster, about this concept of panic. It’s one of the reasons that public officials hold back information: They have this fear that if they give out too much information, people are going to panic. Their response to the walking well who showed up at emergency departments is that those people are panicking.

People are sharing information; they’re seeking out information; they’re asking questions about whether or not they have the symptoms. Those are not incidents of panic or hysteria. That’s rational thinking, where people are asking questions and trying to make decisions based on the information they have available to them.

The best example of a real incident of panic would be in those nightclub fires where people are trapped and the ceiling is burning and the doors have been barricaded and there’s only one exit. People then panic because there is no way out. They’re completely trapped.

But other times, you see people evacuating buildings in a very orderly manner. They’re very calm, they’re working together, they’re rescuing their colleagues, they’re helping one another, they’re very altruistic. You can’t say that that’s an instance of panic.

reason: How have people used Twitter in other disasters?

Sutton: There’s very little research on how people are using Twitter. I did a briefing for people from Twitter a month or so ago, and they said, “This is great, because we don’t really know how people are using our technology.” There’s been a great deal of interest and anecdotal information about how people are using Twitter, but I haven’t seen a published study on the way people are using Twitter in disasters.

I do have a project that’s not published yet that looked at the use of Twitter in the Tennessee Valley coal ash incident. In December of this last year, some coal ash containment ponds ruptured and flooded the Tennessee Valley. I gathered Twitter feeds from that disaster, with the idea that I would see how local people were connecting together to share information. The county had a lot of well-educated people, and I thought they must be using social media to communicate—these were just my assumptions. Stupid assumptions. What I found was that the people who were using Twitter were not locals. They were environmental activists, environmental journalists, people who were concerned about the clean coal issue.

They were located across the country, they were networked, and they had followers who were very concerned about green issues. They consistently backed up their information by tying it to blog accounts, journalistic accounts, YouTube videos, pictures of the destruction, links to briefings from the Tennessee Valley Authority, and that kind of thing. So in that very small disaster that will have a very long-term environmental impact, people were using Twitter to sound the alarm.

My suspicion is we’re going to see that Twitter is used very differently across different kinds of disasters. At the local level, with a natural disaster like the flooding in North Dakota in February, there’s a probability that you’re going to see locals using it to organize. At a technological disaster like the Tennessee Valley Authority, we didn’t see locals using it; we saw environmental activists from across the country using Twitter to share information. With the H1N1 flu, it’s a worldwide event. It wasn’t localized. So the amount of information flowing on there, the level of chatter, was just immense, and there was a lot of information that could be seen as misinformation and very disorganized.

reason: In your study of the California wildfires, you quoted a resident who told you that the “national news websites were completely worthless as they ignored everything except the comparatively minor Malibu fire which burned near some celebrity homes.” So instead they turned to the local professional news and to ultralocal peer-to-peer networks. What were the advantages of those media?

Sutton: The local news knows the local context. They know the streets that they’re standing on when they’re making a report, and when you observe them you know that they’re standing on that corner because you know that corner too. National media that fly into a local community and try to make sense of what’s going on, they don’t know the context.

One of the benefits of tuning in to citizen journalism at a time like that is that local citizens are going to have local knowledge as well. And possibly in a very different way compared to the media that are sharing the information.

There was a community website in the mountains called RimOfTheWorld.net that became the outlet for information during the wildfires. That website was developed specifically to deal with seasonal hazards, and it had been put up several years prior to the 2007 wildfires. Not only were other media outlets reliant on information that was being shared through that website, but the public officials became reliant as well. Firefighters became reliant on that citizen website. The Forest Service was reliant. FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] was reliant.

Comments

LarryA|7.17.09 @ 2:19PM|#

There's a longstanding myth that's perpetuated over and over again, in every disaster, about this concept of panic. It's one of the reasons that public officials hold back information: They have this fear that if they give out too much information, people are going to panic.

Yeah.

Panic is not an effective survival reaction. If people tended to panic whenever the situation went south, the human race would have died out long ago. But you can't sell that idea either in D.C. or in Hollywood.

With the government, a big part of the problem is the philosophy of, "We need to be in control, therefore we must micromanage. If it's Not Invented Here we don't want it."

I've been through several disasters over the past half-century. It was always ordinary people who stepped out of the chaos and started putting pieces back together.

There's also the first rule of public relations. No matter how bad the truth is, if you withhold it the rumors will be worse.

|7.17.09 @ 11:59PM|#

nice post..
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