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Twitter helps manage emergencies

Social media isn\'t just for socializing anymore. Emergency responders and authorities are increasingly using social media to help the public get information ands access to emergency services.
[additional-authors]
December 2, 2014

This story originally appeared on themedialine.org.

Social media isn't just for socializing anymore. Emergency responders and authorities are increasingly using social media to help the public get information ands access to emergency services.

“What we have learned in the last four years, since Haiti earthquake, is that social media is the main tool to both disseminate and collect information, both from the public, different first responders or volunteers who want to be active and participate,” Bruria Adini, a professor of emergency medicine at Ben Gurion University, told The Media Line, adding that because of social media's accessibility and durability it can be an essential tool for the management of emergency situations.

Authorities and emergency responders aren't the only ones tweeting out information. During disasters, terrorist attacks or other emergencies, Twitter becomes flooded with information about the event from all sides of the spectrum, including the public. In order to sift through the large amount of tweets and updates about situations, Tomer Simon, a PhD candidate at Ben Gurion University (BGU), developed Twitter Mate, a tool that collects, stores and analyzes tweets generated by the crowd and specific accounts. 

Twitter is now being used in every emergency situation, with specific hashtags relating to an event becoming the primary place to go for information. Authorities dealing with the event use their Twitter account as well, giving the public immediate access to needed information. For example, during the Haiti earthquake in 2010, emergency personnel tweeted where tents and other emergency services had been erected.

“[Twitter Mate] is essentially a sophisticated recording system,” Simon said. “What I do is record all of the hashtags and tweets but [the system] also enables me to identify the key players in the emergency; public media, or authorities.”

The point of Twitter Mate is to provide a way for emergency management to be more efficient. This tool enables them to listen to social media and detect issues and topics being raised during emergencies, making social media a supporting mechanism that can alert authorities of other events going on.

“Twitter Mate has enabled us to collect information in all the major events that have happened, the Westgate Mall attack [in Kenya] is one example, but we also used it to monitor conflict in Israel,” Avini said. “It's very useful as a research tool to get data, analyze it and understand the phenomena, which translates into information we can use and have interventions and recommendations for emergency entities to use during events.”

As Simon works to develop and improve Twitter Mate, he's been using it for his research, following emergencies the terrorist attack at Kenya's Westgate Mall and the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) Operation Protective Edge earlier this year.

The IDF has more then 30 different social media accounts, with heavy use of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Tumblr, to name a few. These accounts are used to create what Simon called a “narrative of the war.” The IDF is constantly providing visual information, including videos, photos and infographics; their social media activities focus on releasing information quickly as part of the information war against terrorism..

According to Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, head of IDF social media, the army’s social media strategy makes information readily available and accessible, not just during emergencies and times of conflict, but year-round. With accounts on different media platforms in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic (in addition to Hebrew), he said they have a combined reach of over three million followers.

Other factions with a significant social media presence are terror organizations like Hamas and al-Shabaab, in Kenya, who used Twitter during their four day siege of the Westgate Mall to keep an eye on operations happening outside.

During last summer’s fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Hamas' social media accounts would deliberate seek out and target Israelis who wrote on Twitter expressing fear or concern over the conflict. Hamas also replied to tweets and “shared” posts at least 700 times, said Lerner. The IDF responded in turn, with over 1000 tweets during the 50 day conflict.

“We are constantly monitoring what's going on in the internet and various social media platforms in order to refute false claims,” Lerner told The Media Line. “As an official organization we have a responsibility to be extremely accurate over what's going on… When there's an incident we have that golden hour when we have to be responsive and responsible, we can't just tweet out information based on a preliminary report because it could be mistaken,” he said, adding that throughout the Gaza fighting, the IDF had a reach of over 570 million people.

Emergency management is usually one-directional: responders go to the scene of an event, they deal with it, they send out press releases and statements to the press and they release information to the public. Now, however, the public can interact with the information presented and relay back information that the responders might not have had before, or even at all.

“They get a situational awareness, they already know what's going on in the field without having sent people in yet, so they can utilize their resources much more effectively,” Simon said. “Social media is a strong tool to manage any crisis.”

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