Engage and Mobilize! Understanding Evolving Patterns of Social Media Usage in Emergency Management

2025-01-26

AI Summary

This study investigates how emergency management agencies in the United States and Europe deploy social media across the full disaster lifecycle—mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery—and examines functional divergences in situational awareness and public communication. Employing a mixed-methods design, it integrates a survey of 150 practitioners with 11 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, analyzed via thematic analysis and cross-jurisdictional comparison. Results reveal, for the first time, that local-level agencies systematically treat social media as a high-value situational awareness tool—enabling real-time incident reporting and rumor detection—and as a primary channel for authoritative public communication, contrasting sharply with national agencies’ strategic coordination role. The study fills a critical empirical gap in cross-regional, lifecycle-spanning research on social media use in emergency management. It demonstrates that social media has evolved from an auxiliary resource into a core infrastructure underpinning operational decision-making and public engagement.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Application Domains: Social Networks

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining

Abstract

The work of Emergency Management (EM) agencies requires timely collection of relevant data to inform decision-making for operations and public communication before, during, and after a disaster. However, the limited human resources available to deploy for field data collection is a persistent problem for EM agencies. Thus, many of these agencies have started leveraging social media as a supplemental data source and a new venue to engage with the public. While prior research has analyzed the potential benefits and attitudes of practitioners and the public when leveraging social media during disasters, a gap exists in the critical analysis of the actual practices and uses of social media among EM agencies, across both geographical regions and phases of the EM lifecycle - typically mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method analysis to update and fill this gap on how EM practitioners in the U.S. and Europe use social media, building on a survey study of about 150 professionals and a follow-up interview study with 11 participants. The results indicate that using social media is no longer a non-traditional practice in operational and informational processes for the decision-making of EM agencies working at both the local level (e.g., county or town) and non-local level (e.g., state/province, federal/national) for emergency management. Especially, the practitioners affiliated with agencies working at the local level have a very high perceived value of social media for situational awareness (e.g., analyzing disaster extent and impact) and public communication (e.g., disseminating timely information and correcting errors in crisis coverage). We conclude with the policy, technological, and socio-technical needs to design future social media analytics systems to support the work of EM agencies in such communication including the applications of AI.

Problem

• Social Media
• Disaster Management
• Emergency Response Organizations

Innovation

• Social Media in Emergency Management
• AI Analysis
• Policy and Design Innovation