The use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook soared last week after the Manchester terrorist attack.
A recent survey by the Tavistock Institute found that 85 per cent of adult UK citizens regularly use some form of social media, but that that usage increases exponentially during emergencies. Around a third of those polled said that they had used social media to find or share information during an emergency.
As with social media in general, this proportion is much higher among younger people – with almost 60 per cent of 18-24s having done so. A ‘digital divide’ appears between those aged 18-44 and those aged 45 or above – with a significant fall in social media use in emergencies among the latter. This may be because smartphone use is much higher among young.
Within 10 hours of the Paris terrorist attack in 2015, around 6.7 million posts with the hashtag #prayforparis appeared on Twitter.
Similarly, analysis by the Tavistock Institute showed that 8809 messages were tweeted within 2 minutes of the Manchester attacks; an average of 73.4 tweets per second.
Rooms for the stranded
Some present at the arena were using social media to inform friends and family that they were safe, while others were sharing photos of still-missing relatives and friends.
Later on, Manchester residents offered rooms to stay for those stranded with the hashtag #roomsformanchester.
Other popular hashtags, each with thousands of messages and retweets, included #manchesterexplosion, #ManchesterArena, #Manchesterattacks, #Manchesterbombing and #PrayforManchester.
Creating fake news
Social media, however, was also misused to spread false rumours, including fake photos of young people supposedly missing.
In one example, a photo of a girl who lives in Melbourne, Australia, was posted on Twitter as a missing person, while in another instance, someone posted a photo of a child clothing model claiming it was the user’s brother who was missing.
This is one reason why many, particularly older citizens, are reluctant to use social media in general and, in particular during emergencies: 64% of those surveyed by the Tavistock Institute said that they did not trust social media because of false information.
The emergency services, such as the police, fire or ambulance services, are also sometimes hesitant to use social media in their emergency responses because of the lack of trustworthy information.
Is Twitter self-policing?
False rumours are indeed a concern. But evidence suggests that other social media users are often pretty good at identifying false rumours and quick to quash them.
During the 2016 Brussel bombing, some videos shared on Twitter claimed to be from an eyewitness at the airport. But other Twitter users quickly identified them as fakes as they did not resemble Brussels airport.
However, research in the USA after the Boston bombings in 2013 found that the rapid spread of rumours via retweets, as well the mainstream media, slowed down the process by which other users could correct ‘fake news’.
What can we do about this?
Some argue that social media platforms could and should do more to stop the spread of false information.
Even though, after Manchester, some false tweets were taken down (and the accounts sending them were suspended), others continued to Tweet false rumours in the following days. Cynics might even argue that platforms such as Twitter benefit from such rumours going viral—which increases their traffic.
So should citizens and emergency services shy away from using social media to share and find information during emergencies? I think this would be mistaken, as there are many examples of how it can be beneficial in such situations.
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Not only can it mobilise emotional and practical support after an emergency—by offering accommodation as in Manchester, or recruiting for clean-up operations after the London riots in 2011—but emergency services can use the information to inform their responses.
Emergency services across Europe, from the Antwerp Fire Service to the Rotterdam-Rijnmond Safety Authority and Greater Manchester Police, for example, regularly use social media to inform their response and provide updates to the public.
Bert Brugghemans (Commandant of the Antwerp Fire Service), for example, explained how they used social media in a recent situation, saying:
There was a bus on fire on the highway and before we’d even got a call about it, we’d received a picture of it via social media. We could tell from this photo that the bus was on the hard shoulder and not blocking the traffic. It also showed that the bus was empty – so there were no immediate victims. So even in a relatively small incident like this, you can learn an awful lot from social media.
Such examples highlight the beneficial potential of social media, although we still need better ways to filter out misinformation, and to persuade older people to use it—before, during and after emergencies.
