Emergency services are finding it difficult to deliver potentially life-saving messaging during natural disasters due to social media noise.
New research from the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States found that during recent major hurricanes in that country public safety messaging was drowned out by trivial content.
Study author Dr Jose Ramirez-Marquez said when natural disasters struck, social networks like Facebook and X could be powerful tools for public communication, but often, rescue workers and government officials struggled to make themselves heard.
Dr Ramirez-Marquez said in their study they found important safety messaging was lost among trivial social content, including people tweeting about pets, sharing human-interest stories, or bickering about politics.
“That’s a big problem for officials working to understand where help is needed and to communicate effectively with people impacted by disasters,” he said.
“It’s like being at a crowded party. If everyone’s arguing loudly about politics, it’s hard to make yourself heard over the noise.”
Dr Ramirez-Marquez said the study looked at the clusters of tweets and posts that attracted the most attention and engagement before, during, and after the storms.
He said the results showed that in many cases the topics that generated the most intense online interest were completely unrelated to safety messaging or rescue work.
“During Hurricane Harvey, for instance, 24 of the 50 most active topics involved discussion of dogs affected by flooding. By contrast, just seven of the 50 most active topics involved public safety messages.”
He said similar patterns played out during other storms with more than half of high-engagement topics during Hurricane Florence, involving either animal-related chatter or political arguments, while just 19 out of the top 50 topics involved rescue or public safety messages.
“During Hurricane Imelda, meanwhile, debates about climate change accounted for almost one-quarter of all high-engagement topics, drowning out higher-stakes safety messages.”
Read the full study: Harnessing text information for enhanced hurricane resilience and public engagement: Unveiling disaster perspectives through social media
