Virginia Tech, social media and emergencies (Reuters): Much has been made of how students used social media — Instant Messaging, LiveJournal, blogs etc — to update one another during the mass campus shootings at Virginia Tech last month. But despite all this networking, and the ubiquity of mobile phones, social media did as badly as official communication channels in issuing warnings in the two-hour gap between the first two shootings and the later rampage.
Mark Jones of ReutersAlertNet wonders to what extent the growing access to communications technology does make it increasingly possible to issue alerts and so limit the impact of humanitarian emergencies?
Howard mentioned Twitter — a cross between SMS texting and blogging which can be done via your mobile. So I asked Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, to comment on whether it could be used as a social warning system.
“Messages can spread quickly in real time across multiple devices to groups of people on a system like Twitter. This seems to be key in any emergency. Additionally, if a person is part of a social network that operates in near real time, that person’s friends may be of assistance to an emergency worker. Where was this person last? Are they allergic? Etc.
“With regard to false alarms, that’s an interesting question. My hunch is that false alarms might be detected similarly to the way rumors are dispelled online. The community itself fact-checks and self organizes around the truth eventually. Not sure if that would be true or not or if it would take too long.
Comments
@ 03:49
Do not even contemplate using unreliable, easily spoofed and faked technologies like unencrypted or non-digitally signed email, or “Twitter” like web pages or SMS text messages, for time critical emergency alerts of any sort.
These technologies all have a possible role to play in the aftermath of a natural disaster or human attack, when the danger is over, but not before.
Why should anyone trust their lives and those of their families and friends, to systems which they cannot and do not trust even their credit card details to ?
False alarms and panics actually cost lives directly (heart attack victims, road accidents etc.) and indirectly (emergency services are diverted or delayed from attending to real incidents) and cause lots of economic disruption and damage.
Why make us even more vulnerable to madmen and terrorists and organised criminals, than we are already ?