Crowd sourcing in times of crisis
We’re more and more connected everyday, it’s not really up for debate whether we are or not... that’s pretty much been decided. But mediums such as twitter has allowed everyday people to do something more than just communicate but also, comment on the world around us.
Nowadays most live programs on television allow twitter posts to pop on the screen, live debates especially use this for example the ABC show Q&A, as well as the big political debates as a way to have the public ask questions directly to the politicians.
But this is merely the surface of the power of using crowd sourcing.
In times of crisis before mediums such as twitter, the information reported about the situations during and after were dependent on trusting the, often at times 2nd 3rd or even 4th hand, information provided solely by the news. this distanced how the ‘unaffected’ people viewed the crisis but also prevented many people learning about the fates of their loved ones until much later.
During the Paris Friday night attacks earlier this year, many of those who were in the city at the time were able to message family and friends to make sure they were ok, Facebook made this even easier by allowing those to “check in as safe” as a status update which allowed people, who were traveling as well as residents, to quickly inform others of their locations and safety, some messages were even sent out during the attacks.
However the events of that night also illustrated one major issue of crowd sourcing during a crisis... misinformation.
In an article linked at the bottom KATIE ROGERS discusses this very issue, pointing out the occurrences of misleading information, such as the subsequent sharing of an image of a “man in a suicide vest”, and a photo of the Eiffel tower “claiming it was the first time the monument had gone dark since 1889″ neither of which were true. The desire to ‘share’ information was so strong that people were sharing completely falsified information. A possible explanation for this is the idea of the ‘like’ and the more likes a comment or photo has the higher the possibility for an individual to be the source and/or part of the social movement. Unfortunately this continues to be a problem and is likely to be so as long as people are more interested in being part of a phenomenon than helping.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/paris-attacks-give-rise-to-fakes-and-misinformation.html?_r=0
