The Social Media Challenges for Crisis Reporting

From the earthquake in Haiti, to Snowmageddon in Washington, DC and Japan’s earthquake and the riots in London; social media tools are increasingly playing a role during natural and man-made crises. From monitoring a situation and reporting through to organizing. There are major benefits, but increasingly there are growing challenges that solutions will need to overcome. From our research into how social medias are used before, during and after a crises, we’ve identified several issues;

1. Validity of Information: One of the biggest challenges is determining the accuracy and validity of information posted to public (open) tools such as Ushahidi and CrisisMappers. Anyone with a mobile phone or wireless device (i.e. iPad) can enter information. From where a house may have collapsed to where a store is being trashed. But what happens when someone in a fragile state reports a collapsed house with victims after an earthquake, but it isn’t true, they’re just looking for something they don’t really need. Recovery resources are assigned and where the help is really needed, victims may die. Or rioters mis-direct police to take attention away from what is really happening.

2. Identity & Reliability: Anyone who can access a publicly available reporting system can add information. But who are they? Where are they? Such anonymity can make it difficult to prosecute offenders later or gain valuable information from a witness. These too are critical issues.

3. From Data to Information to Intelligence: So much “data” is fed into the system or systems with the result of information overload. For a decision to be made, one must be able to extract intelligence from the information. No solution as yet addresses such an issue. The intelligence in the information comes from being able to validate sources, determine reliability of the information and accuracy of location and the event in question.

4. Too Many Systems No One Solution: Ushahidi is by far the best real-time reporting and monitoring tool for crises, but it isn’t the only one. Different aid agencies and governments may use other tools or citizens may create their own tool. As a result, there are multiple inputs that can lead to indecision or resource paralysis on the ground. In addition, no one solution pulls information in from all available sources; some use email and txt messaging over maps while others rely on txt messaging alone to populate a map and people not on the ground to clarify data on a map.

These are just four of the main issues we’ve identified with social media monitoring and reporting during a crises. They are not the fault of the people who’ve spent an enormous amount of time to build and populate; there is evidence that these tools can be vital. But challenges such as those above make it increasingly difficult for aid agencies and governments providing relief or the affected government, to use them in more than an anecdotal fashion. For security services and policing, they are even less reliable.

Addressing the challenges in identity and validity, technology may be able to help, but it will be sometime yet before that is a reality.