Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter was already something to be concerned about. The option to purchase a verified account was a major sign that things were hanging in the balance. Then he started with the all-staff emails and layoffs (which look shonky in terms of employment law). For emergency management this raises all of the red flags; sounds all of the alarms.

There’s currently a lot of doom on my timeline; and in classic twitter style, a lot of memes! If anything, I’ve noted a slight reversal to the Twitter of old, more conversation and camaraderie.

I joined Twitter in 2009 and have been a heavy user ever since. It’s become my go-to place for information of all kinds, as well as how I’ve built connections and friendships.

The anticipatory grief about the loss of Twitter is real. My hope for Twitter is that the disruption settles. Similarly to my hope for the NHS, it’ll reform, rebrand and things will change, but it will ultimately endure. However, on both counts, I think it’s a case of wait and see…

In an attempt to avoid doom-scrolling here are some quick thoughts about Twitter highlights in an emergency management context. (Note: I’d typically embed tweets but with the speculation, I’ve included screengrabs instead)

Breaking News

The shift from having TV news at programmed intervals to rolling news channels in the late 1990s was huge. Those channels then had to find content to fill their airtime, and so emerged the idea of ‘citizen journalism‘. This was linked to rapidly increasing access to mobile phones which gave journalists the ability to speak to people in the midst of a breaking story.

The rise of social media was another step change in how we consume news. The speed and scale of Twitter (and perhaps the original ability to send tweets via SMS) made it the place for breaking news and a kaleidoscope of real-time updates.

As an emergency manager, this is extremely helpful to help us build ‘situational awareness’, and we enhanced our skills in verification and validation to process information from a wide variety of sources.

For major broadcasters and publishers, Twitter is still a major part of their newsgathering strategy. Both they and viewers will need to adjust to another new way to consume news.

Where it all began (for me at least)

One of my earliest Twitter memories relates to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, and I’m not alone in that experience:

Countless disasters and crisis events since have been live-tweeted. I couldn’t list them all, but the replies to this post do more than I would ever be able to collate.

Even pop singer @OllyMurs tried to get in on sharing disaster news in 2017.

Community

With Twitter emerging as a place for breaking news, there was an early adoption by Emergency Managers.

Communities developed around shared interests and found new ways to have distributed and often asynchronous conversations.

• #SMEMChat – provided an organised, facilitated, and moderated discussion every Friday, with key emergency management topics or developments being debated in public
• #EMGTwitter emerged as a way of categorising emergency management tweets

• #EUCivPro initially seemed to start as a promotion of the European Union’s disaster response arrangements, but then got adopted by emergency managers working across Europe.

Sharing knowledge and increasing visibility

Twitter allows us an insight into users’ lives, or at least what they choose to share. Whilst this hasn’t always been a good thing, and some people have been better at it than others, here are some things I think are good:

• For a long time, the official @NHS account handed the keyboard to actual members of NHS staff to share frontline insights.
• Similarly, many Police, Fire and Ambulance services provided ‘from the control room’ days – giving a first-hand account of the types and numbers of calls received
• Live tweeting from conferences.
• Live tweeting through TV shows and Movies – such as the popular #EPMOVIENIGHT created by yours truly, or DisasterologistsAtTheMovies headed by John Carr and Samantha Montano from the USA.
• It has revolutionised politics with the rise of the ‘Twitter presidency’ and the ability to speak directly to any other user. But on a more local level, it has allowed emergency managers to see behind the curtain of senior leaders who use the platform, and for emergency managers themselves to become more visible (until they were ignored).

Raising awareness

Quite how effective Twitter-only campaigns are is a bit of an unknown, but there have been a variety of long-running initiatives to leverage social media to spread awareness. This is important because it represents a change in approaching these sorts of campaigns – meeting people in the spaces they are already using.

• Twitter has been used to share details of the post-disaster impacts of a range of different crises, and to raise money to support recovery projects. No better example than this from Britney Spears:

• It’s regularly used to share details of disaster anniversaries, helping to ensure that both the people affected and the lessons from those incidents are not forgotten.
• Strike action on the London Underground in 2014 was an opportunity for Leonard Cheshire to raise awareness about the accessibility of the tube network.
• Awareness campaigns often took a three-word slogan #TestItTuesday, #RunHideTell, and #HandsFaceSpace which often got appropriated by Twitter users with varying degrees of support or snark.
• There has even been an attempt to introduce September as ‘preparedness month’ spearheaded by the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) 30 Days 30 Ways campaign. The UK adopted this in 2015 and it’s been nurtured by my colleagues Joanne Maddams and Monika Al-Mufti who established @30Days30WaysUK (whose month of activity in September 2022 experienced its own ’emergency’ resulting postponement of scheduled posts)

Innovation

• Twitter Alerts provided a solution which Government agencies, at least in the UK, had grappled with for years. Notification, direct to your phone, of critical information.
• Whilst not exclusively Twitter-based, 999 Eye was an innovation from West Midlands Fire Service which enables emergency service call takers to stream images from the scene of an incident or taken from social media to support information gathering
• The information or ‘big data’ gathered from Twitter has been the subject of considerable study, including:
  • Social media in emergency management: exploring Twitter use by emergency responders in the UK
  • How Twitter is changing modern policing
• The Virtual Operations Support Team remains a fantastic approach to collecting open-source intelligence to support emergency response. Sadly it never really got off the ground in the UK other than in one area of Scotland. But it introduced me to the incredible and always helpful @CazMilligan, and status-quo challengers @sct_r and @CherylBle.

Disaster Memes and other fun things

The post-disaster fake news shark became a common theme, with some notable sightings in the floodwaters of Sydney in 2014, Houston, Texas in 2015, and then Belfast in 2017. People became wise to it though and called the UK Government out when they posted this:

In case you were worried about its welfare, the post-disaster shark was most recently spotted back in Sydney in 2022…

And what would this post be without reference to the original disaster meme and link to the Quarantelli Meme Thread?

Without Twitter, would we have had such scintillating office conversations as “is the dress blue and black or white and gold‘ or ‘are there more windows or doors in the world‘. And not forgetting this mic-drop moment (the actual tweet has been deleted but this fan account continues its legacy)!

Connection, support & challenge

Crucially, perhaps most importantly of all, Twitter has been a support channel, especially in times of trouble. It has helped people to connect with their tribe to discuss issues, seek advice, build confidence and form friendships.

Sometimes tribes have clashed, and Twitter’s inaction to combat hate speech (and provide a solution to the edit button saga) is certainly a factor in the platform becoming more adversarial. However, in my experience, the good times massively outnumbered the bad.

• Back in the early days, #FollowFriday (often abbreviated to #FF because of the original 140-character limit – which incidentally, sharpened our skills for writing more concisely) helped people to make new connections. It’s interesting to see the same hashtag reappearing on Mastodon.
• #GovCamp, #LocalGovCamp, and #BlueLightCamp were instrumental in forming early-career connections.
• The Emergency Planning Society ‘Huddles’ started life on Twitter very early in the response to COVID, primarily for decompression and chatting about cats.
• I’ve also shared links to my (sometimes deliberately provocative) blogs on Twitter, partly because some might be interested, but also to enable others to challenge my views and help me see a bigger picture, such as this exchange with respected professor Ed Galea. In what other world would that direct communication take place so openly?

Your highlights

I’ll be sticking around on Twitter for as long as possible. I don’t think the alternative platforms offer the same experience. However, as a good contingency planner, I have now got an active account on Mastodon, which I’m learning to use and connect with other twitterers in exile.

How have you used and seen Twitter used in emergencies? What are your highlights and what do you think will happen next? Share with me @mtthwhgn…for as long as you’re able!

Since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, I’ve been a keen advocate of the use of twitter in emergencies, leading me to join in the spring of 2009. As social networks become increasingly popular it’s inevitable that their functionality evolves to make them more directly useful beyond being a communication platform.

About a month ago I met with @PocketSteve from Twitter to talk about Twitter Alerts. This is a new service provided by Twitter which has its roots in the Japanese earthquake and subsequent incidents in Fukushima, and allows time-critical and verified information to be cascaded directly to individuals from responding organisations.

Following a succesful launch in Japan and the United States, Twitter Alerts are now available in the UK. As an opt-in service, you need to activate Twitter alerts for each of the accounts that you want to receive information from, whilst messages sent using the system will (hopefully) be infrequent, here’s what I think you can expect from them…

• Metropolitan Police – large road traffic accidents, public order incidents and terrorism – I’d say that if you’re only going to sign up for one of these accounts this should be it (although I’d encourage you to go for all of them!) as the police usually play a significant role in the response to an emergency
• City of London Police – as above but limited to the square mile – important for those who work or travel into the city, not just those who live there
• British Transport Police – incidents affecting the railways or London Underground (note that this will be national alert messages)
• London Fire Brigade – updates and alerts of major fires and explosions, incidents involving chemicals, radioactive or biological substances.
• London Ambulance Service – updates on major incidents and emergencies incidents affecting people – for the most reliable information on casualty numbers this has got to be your best source
• Environment Agency – flooding from rain, rivers or the sea and pollution incidents
• Mayor of London – general comment and reassurance about emergency response and recovery, this will be your place for key messages on actions you can take if you’re not directly involved

So there you have it, follow the accounts and sign up to their Twitter Alerts…and share this post so others can do the same!

Oh, and if you’re not London based, or are interested in updates from other emergency services in the UK then here’s a link to all participating accounts.

Recently I was talking to a colleague about the value (or not) of social media as new ways of communicating and engaging the public. Social networking is the way of the world now. One of the main challenges for emergency managers is to keep arrangements grounded in reality. If that’s how people are communicating in disasters, which we know it is, then we need to embrace it to get authoritative messages out there.

Accepting that I was preeching to the converted I took to twitter to get a reaction, and my favourite was from Rob Dudgeon, Director of Emegrency Preparedness at San Francisco Office of Emergency Management:

If we need to join the conversation, we need a better understanding of how people use social media organically.

CAVEAT – Despite being interesting, I’m not sure with a sample size of 8 that my results are any more conclusive than those adverts claiming 97% of people would recommend a particular shampoo. However, the results of my recent survey are in!

“How many of your Facebook friends do you think you could call on in an emergency, perhaps to provide you with a bed, or a sofa, for a couple of nights?

I don’t want to prejudice the results of my survey, but here’s my hypothesis for ‘Average Joe’

• 140 x 10% (who he feels he could contact) = 14 Facebook friends that he can contact
• 14 x 50% (who live locally) = 7 of which live locally who could help Joe out“

How did the results comapre to my predictions? Well, first, here’s a graph of the results. It’s interesting to see the difference between the responses in terms of how many people they would be comfortable asking for help. I’m sure there’s a lot more social analysis that could have been done to look into this – is it a product of age, gender, profession, or a combination of these and other factors?

There is significantly less variation between the friends that could help that live locally, which is euqlly interesting, but I’m not sure what that indicates.

Now, let’s use this crowdsourced data to update our details for Average Joe:

• He has 272 friends on Facebook (greater than the 140 Facebook average)
• Of those, he feels like he could call on 8.4% of them – that’s 23 friends
• Of the 23 that he could call, the data suggests 2.41% live locally (this is far less than my estimate)
• This means that Joe has 1/6th of a friend locally that he could pre-plan with – let’s be optimistic and round that up to one whole friend!

The main observation is that the number of people that users would be comfortable in asking for help, isn’t too far away from my 10% hypothesis, but that they might not necessarily be the people who are locally able to assist. This is interesting, becuase lots of other data suggests that Facebook is highly localised into geographic communities – yet are these communities that we would/could turn to in an emergency? From this rudimentary data collection, it looks like the majority of Facebook friends that we’d turn to for help are those who live further away from us.

What does all this mean? We got a pretty graph, and perhaps we identified that social media (or Facebook at least) doesn’t spell the end of the need to develop relationships and networks locally which you can use in an emergency.

The main lesson – social media is here, and it’s here to stay, but (at the moment?) it’s an addition rather than a replacement.

I initially wrote, and published, this post yesterday evening as the events were unfolding. This morning, news was still coming out of Boston and appearing on social media, so I’ve just made one or two running edits, in italics, to keep it current.

I don’t intend to make light of the coordinated series of explosions in Boston, but I wanted to talk about one aspect of social media, the ‘etiquette of online response’ rather than the events themselves, which the world has just witnessed.

I joined FriendsReunited in 2002. I tried joining Facebook in 2004, when it was still restricted to universities in the States. I joined MySpace in 2005 and was then a relatively early adopter of Twitter in 2009. There have been other formats that have been so fleeting I don’t even remember them. So, I’m confident in saying that I know my way round the various social mediums and in 2011 Emer Coleman (previously of Government Digital Service) referred to me as a “digital native”.

The advent of social media, and the internet more generally, has, without question, changed the way in which I consume information. I’m not alone in this, and social media offers much more than a mechanism for posting pictures of what you’ve had for dinner (although I have nothing against it’s use for that purpose).

But I do find social media interesting during a ‘Breaking News’ story. (Update: the first time I remember encountering this ‘etiquette’ issue was 2010’s Roaul Moat story.)

On twitter we have the hashtag and the humble retweet, which I think are magnificent functions. The Hastag (e.g.#SMEM) allows ‘searches’ of linked tweets, making finding related information easier. The retweet then allows for official and verified messages to be shared to a much wider audience. Whilst twitter has it’s downsides (speculation and subjectivity), I think it’s far more effective. However, on the other hand, my Facebook news feed was jam packed with either people attempting to break the news themselves, or expressing their deep emotional outpourings to affected families. I find both of these considerably less helpful than a quick RT.

It’s simply not instinctive to me to head to Facebook in the ‘initial phase’. I just don’t expect people that I went to primary school with to have the latest information (maybe I didn’t go to school with the right people?!). Obviously, it goes without saying, that this is not about Facebook as a platform, but about how people use it.

Conversely, my twitter feed was filled with some fantastic RTs of relevant news agencies, official feeds and bystander pictures and videos. I didn’t follow @Boston_Police before today, and I doubt I’ll ever really need their day to day updates, but they’re a demonstration of how twitter can be used to spread news and provide reassurance. Yes, I’ve seen one or two images which are certainly shocking, and I think a degree of sensitivity is needed for these graphic images (Update: It can be distressing to see people who have been badly injured, and perhaps the media, and all of us need a bit more self-regulation when sharing images). However, whilst they might show upsetting scenes (including this video), I personally find them preferable to the banality of sympathy that I witnessed last night on Facebook.

Surely it’s a given that we are appalled by this type of incident, why do you need to let your friends know you’re shocked ? In an emergency people who have been affected (either directly or distally) are desperately searching for useful information…yes, be sad and donate to relief funds, but don’t occupy the news feeds of people who are looking for information. This particularly important the closer the events are to home.

That said, there isn’t an instruction book, and only a degree of etiquette has evolved as the platforms have developed. What’s your view? Do you see a difference in the way people use different mediums? What works and what doesn’t? How can we make the best use of these useful communication tools?

Image Credit: Awareforum.org