False Alert: Can You Really Trust that Tweet for Emergency Communications?

[Commentary] Over the past few years, there has been skyrocketing growth in the use of social media to get the word out during emergency situations. From fires to disease outbreaks to police shootings, more and more people turn to Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites to get the latest updates on incidents from reliable sources and "friends." I applaud these social media efforts, and this emergency management communications trend has been a very good thing up to this point. But dark clouds are on the horizon. And soon, maybe you'll need to hold-off on that retweet. Why?

A game-changing story from The New York Times shows how highly coordinated disinformation campaigns can spell big problems for emergency communications in the future. The article says, "On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta (GA). The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. ...On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta." In my opinion, this is probably just the beginning of a growing trend, and there is likely much worse to come.