Legitimacy, clarity and Twittering disasters

By Fester:

Ad Hoc Herectic, one of the smartest people I know, is riffing on open source information streams in public disasters such as the Mumbai attack:

Twitter is a tool where, if a public safety agency was quick and smart enough, they could correct public misconception quickly and relatively painlessless without relying the market penetration of traditional mass media. After all, who's going to go throw on a noisy TV or Radio when there's a mass murderers appearing out of no where and shooting into a crowd.....

 I love the idea of an informed citizenry exercising their right to communicate in normal times but even more so during times of stress.  And so my support must go to the opinion smack dab in the middle at number two. There's a saying I've heard many times that, even through "official" channels that 90% of the information coming in the first couple hours from the scene of a large incident is gunk anyway.  All I want in the first few minutes, hours, of an incident is to know that there is buzz in the citizenry that yes, something is happening, stay alert.

Stay alert. That's half the battle right there.

Once people have been alerted to an incident, Twitter's quick iterative fact checking will win the day. These distributed information loops will be particularly effective with that enterprising public safety agency, calling LAFD/and halfheartedly LAPD, interjecting "official" news to aid the acceleration of correct information throughout the social network. 

Legitimacy in today's world is based upon trust.  Good information that is widely distributed through a variety of common channels improves trust.  It also relieves the responding agencies of a massive command and control problem of evacuation and crisis avoidance.  People can self-organize and figure out if they should barricade and shelter in place, evacuate to the north, or take the back alley and head towards the water front.  This frees up resources for the actual response to a crisis instead of dealing with the secondary demand of district wide crowd control. 

Twitter and other forms of open source communication is a double edged sword but if there are common platforms of understanding in place before a disaster on how to communicate information and that there is iterative fact checking to make sure decent information is getting out there, a radically transparent public security response will most likely improve both the response itself AND the respnders' legitimacy. It also places incentives to avoid credibility self-immolation of the sort that destroyed the Spanish Conservative government in March 2004 when they lied to the public for political ends.