All the news that’s fit to Twitter

During major events and crises, social media’s importance is rising

The alleged plot to “hide the homeless” during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver foreshadowed Tweets and blog posts to come. A month before the convention, the blogosphere was atwitter because Denver was reportedly planning to give homeless people tickets to the movies, the zoo, pretty much anywhere but the street.

The story hit the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report and legions of smaller outlets. Indignant inquiries followed. Why would Denver try to keep its poorest people hidden? Fair question.

“The problem was, that was never true,” a city official told Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the University of Colorado. “It was never going to happen. No one ever had that idea, and I’m not even sure where it originated.”

Another Denver employee suggested that officialdom’s normal response—trying to correct the record—just wasn’t working. The story had “taken a life of its own and kept coming back. … It would show up on someone else’s blog again, and it would make the rounds again.”

Social media—which include blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr—are hallmarks of “Web 2.0,” which allows peer-to-peer information exchange. Though hard to monitor and harder to rebut, they are an increasingly important—and sometimes helpful—part of the media landscape, particularly during major events and crises.

Sutton, a sociologist and a research associate with CU’s Institute for Behavioral Science, studied the intersection of social media and the DNC. Two incidents underscored the role social media would play in coverage of the convention.

One was the spurious hide-the-homeless story. The other was the fact that the Democratic National Convention Committee issued press credentials to more than 120 state and local bloggers—a fourfold increase from the number of credentialed bloggers covering the 2004 DNC.

DNC and Denver officials recognized that monitoring social media might help public-information officers manage misinformation, control rumors and quickly identify salient issues being discussed on the web.

But social-media sites are often off-limits to public employees, so Denver’s Office of Emergency Management received unrestricted access to Facebook, Twitter and their ilk. Nonetheless, social media remained largely off of officialdom’s radar, Sutton found.

Monitoring social media put the event’s managers in uncharted territory. As one official told Sutton, there was no strategy to monitor non-traditional news sources. “We also didn’t have the resources to look at Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. We didn’t spend time there … if we had, we would have been blind, just nosing around. The sheer volume of material was overwhelming.”

In the most recent edition of the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Sutton cites three news stories that “snowballed” with the help of social media.

During the week of the convention, 90 protesters were arrested near the Denver Convention Center; police in riot gear used pepper spray, and the mainstream media recorded it (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb84xVMbfqA). The next day, a member of the anti-war group CODEPINK was shoved to the ground by a baton-wielding police officer; a video of the blow and arrest quickly appeared on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzrBYF99QKI).

Finally, an ABC news producer was arrested on a sidewalk outside the Brown Palace Hotel; a video showing a policeman forcing the journalist into the street and officers restraining him by the neck during arrest also hit the web (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxn56AKnqE).

Public-information officers responded to each of these “snowballing” stories, as they normally would. But, as Sutton notes, a major political party’s nominating convention has the potential to face a significant crisis from civil unrest, environmental disaster or terrorist attack.

Sutton asks: “If a crisis event had occurred, would there have been enough flexibility in the plans and capable personnel to monitor online sources for breaking information beyond traditional media sources?” Probably not, she concludes.

Sutton is an expert on the emerging importance of social media in disasters. She and Leysia Palen, assistant professor of computer science and director of CU’s ConnectivIT Lab, have studied social-media use in the wake of 2007’s Virginia Tech shootings and Southern California wildfires. Their work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Following the Virginia Tech shooting incident, Sutton and Palen along with their co-authors found that VT students and people across the country used Facebook for up-to-the-minute information. Conventional wisdom holds that non-official sources of information are less reliable and more disorganized than traditional media. But in a crisis, Sutton and Palen found that “collective intelligence” could be altruistic and reliable.

In the case of Virginia Tech, Facebook users correctly identified all 32 of the casualties before the university released their names to the public. Apparently mindful of the damage of a falsely reported death, these users also challenged each other to verify their sources.

During the California wildfires, citizens used social-media sites because information from official sources was slow and sometimes wrong. Users were even correcting official statements.

Public-information officers released new information on regular cycles, such as every four hours, Sutton noted. “But if you live in an area affected by the fires, you need info that is up to the minute.” Current information was “incredibly valuable to the people affected,” she said, adding:

“It challenged the idea that this command-and-control information process works, that public officials are still in control.”

In her latest journal article, Sutton notes that government officials have not devised mechanisms to assess and use new sources of citizen intelligence during crises. “The starting point is to change policy,” to lift restrictions on government use of social media.

And while officials at the Democratic National Convention did not exploit or even effectively monitor social media, Sutton argues, the event’s “ultimate success” was the fact that “social media was recognized for its potential as a valuable tool for obtaining information from the public.”

With Garry Briese, Sutton is co-founder of the Center for New Media and Resiliency, a 501(c)3 nonprofit group dedicated to increasing the safety, security and resiliency of citizens and communities through the understanding and use of new media and other emerging communications technologies for public safety, emergency response and homeland security.  Sutton and Briese are developing procedures to integrate social media into Incident Command Systems for emergency response.