SHINYA TAKATORI WAS AT HOME IN YAMAGATA WHEN HE FELT THE first rumblings of the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan. At first, on that Friday afternoon of March 11, 2011, Shinya wasn’t sure what was going on. At 2:46 P.M. local time, there had been an 8.9-magnitude tremor some seventy kilometres off the coast of northern Japan. Though he felt the tremors, Shinya emerged unscathed, as Yamagata is far inland. The massive quake caused widespread power outages and fires and a tsunami that laid waste to everything in its path. Thousands were killed, and more than half a million displaced. At the nearby Fukushima power plant, there was a nuclear meltdown.
For Shinya, his immediate concern was for his friends in the port of Sendai. A ten-metre wall of water had struck the city, sweeping away buildings, cars and even planes on the airport’s runway. Shinya, a dance DJ and electronic musician, knew the city well. He would regularly make the one-hour commute to Sendai to earn a little bit of extra money by working in a music store. Having been born and raised in the northern province of Tohoku, which had been hit by the tsunami, he was worried about the fate of friends and family. With fires raging across the region, power lines down and a patchy phone network, Shinya turned to Twitter. “Yamagata is pretty much OK. I can’t get through to Sendai. Twitter is basically the only way,” said one of his tweets.
In the hours following the earthquake and tsunami, the volume of messages on Twitter hit more than 5,000 per second at five separate times. By the end of the day of the quake and tsunami, some 177 million tweets had been sent, compared to an average of fifty million one year earlier. The number of tweets from Japan increased by 500 per cent as survivors reached out to friends, relatives and colleagues in North America, Europe and Asia. They were all, like Shinya, fulfilling a basic human need to connect and communicate. Tales of survival and of loss unfolded at lightning speed in 140-character bites across the web, weaving a patchwork of human fragility in the face of the fearsome power of nature.
Technology has changed the nature of crisis communications in the twenty-first century. The availability of instant information is reshaping how society learns and responds to crises in the hours and days that follow. The ubiquitous cell phone, near-universal connectivity, and free and easy sharing services create an infrastructure that enables words, images and video to spread almost instantly.
During a crisis, timely information can be a matter of life and death. Such information coming from the people in the midst of disaster can help to inform, speed up and improve the emergency response. At the best of times, it can overcome the gulf between the reality on the ground and assumptions about what is needed. The way word of mouth fills the news vacuum following a natural disaster has much in common with how it used to do in the past.
All Saints’ Day on November 1, 1755, was a beautiful Sunday morning, with clear skies and a dazzling sun. Across Lisbon, the faithful were crammed into the city’s great majestic cathedrals and smaller churches to mark one of the holiest days of the Roman Catholic calendar. At the time, Lisbon was a thriving port and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, legendary for its commercial prosperity and cultural sophistication. In a matter of hours, a natural disaster on the scale of the Japanese quake and tsunami of 2011 reduced to rubble the city’s sumptuous palaces, imposing cathedrals and grand mansions.
As priests led the pious in prayers, an earthquake off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean sent shockwaves through Portugal and western Europe. Over ten minutes, three seismic shocks struck Lisbon, destroying buildings and enveloping the city in a thick blanket of dust that blocked out the sun. One of the few contemporary accounts of the cataclysmic event is found in a letter by a visiting Anglican pastor, Richard Goddard. “No words can express the horror of my situation at that instant, involved in almost total darkness, surrounded with a city falling into ruins, and crowds of people screaming, and calling out for mercy,” he wrote about the first few minutes of the quake.
The worst was far from over, as a series of gigantic waves pounded the waterfront. The water swallowed up warships and merchant vessels in the port and flattened the warehouses that lined the harbour. Fires broke out across Lisbon, many sparked by candles lit in devotion to mark All Saints’ Day. The fires quickly engulfed the city as flames spread through the narrow streets and enveloped the timber houses of the city’s medieval centre. There was barely a building untouched by the combination of tremors, water and fire.
News of the catastrophe spread across the continent the same way it does now: through first-person observations, secondhand reports, rumours and speculation. First accounts of the earthquake were shared by word of mouth, and travelled as fast as a horse could gallop. It took about a week to ten days for the news to circulate in Spain and about a fortnight for it to reach London and Paris. The first official account reached England on November 10, in a despatch sent by the influential British ambassador to Spain, Sir Benjamin Keene.
The news spread quickly for the time, but it was met with incredulity. The notion that one of the most celebrated cities in Europe could be wiped off the face of the earth was too shocking for many. It was simply unbelievable that Lisbon, one of the most devout cities on the continent, would be singled out by what many saw as the wrath of God. It didn’t help that the initial reports were often embellished and contradictory, much as happens now on social media. In the absence of timely and reliable information, Europeans exchanged stories, opinions, rumours and theories for months following the disaster.
It was weeks and months before the full extent of the 1755 disaster in Portugal became apparent. Even three weeks after the tragedy, the left-wing London Magazine, subtitled The Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, expressed doubts about the veracity of some of the accounts, saying “we must wait for more exact accounts.” By the turn of 1756, the earthquake was “still on people’s lips,” reported the German Gazette de Cologne.
The speed at which people heard of the tragedy that befell Lisbon in the eighteenth century was extremely slow compared to the pace of news in the twenty-first. But there is much similarity between the events in Portugal and in Japan. In both cases, tales of shaking buildings, massive waves and human loss were spread by word of mouth through conversations or letters. In 1755, these stories were amplified by the media of the time: cheap pamphlets and early newspapers. They were then passed on in family letters, pamphlets, engravings and poems that mixed fact and fiction and sensationalized the tragedy. Today, the same process takes place at a much more accelerated pace, where days become minutes and weeks are hours.
No one is sure how many people died in what became known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake, but historians estimate that between thirty and forty thousand perished in the city alone. By the end of the disaster, only three thousand homes were left standing out of an estimated twenty thousand. The Japanese quake and resulting tsunami of 2011 killed 15,853 people and injured 6,023. A year after the disaster, 3,282 people were still missing and more than 330,000 were living in temporary accommodation. Whole communities were swept away by the crushing tidal wave. The scale of the destruction is hard to capture in numbers. Almost 300,000 buildings were levelled, and a million more were damaged. At times of a natural disaster like the Japan quake and tsunami, minutes matter.
Early warning of a quake could give someone in the affected area just enough time to turn off the gas or dive for cover under a table. But it can take several minutes before monitoring stations detect seismic activity, and several more minutes before an official announcement is broadcast to the nation. People are much better sensors of immediate danger. Thanks to the Internet, smartphones and Twitter, they not only get the news out faster than official sources but also with surprising reliability. And people are very good at telling everyone when the ground shakes.
One of the first studies to show the value of monitoring Twitter for quake information came out of Japan, a country prone to tremors. A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo developed a computer program to monitor Twitter for news about quakes. They ran it during August and September 2009. Over that period, there were ten earthquakes in Japan. Their system detected all the quakes that were powerful enough to be felt by people in a building. The scientists found that the first reports of shaking or swaying came within a minute of an earthquake. By watching for tweets mentioning shaking buildings, the researchers were able to send alerts at least five minutes sooner than a broadcast announcement by the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Today, one of the ways the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) keeps tabs on earthquakes is by monitoring Twitter. People can either follow alerts on quakes picked up by its seismic equipment or its Tweet Earthquake Dispatch. TED has proved to be remarkably good at detecting the first signs of an earthquake on Twitter. In one of its first experiments run over five months in 2009, TED was able to spot forty-eight earthquakes across the world just by analyzing Twitter. In 75 per cent of cases, it was able to detect the tremors within two minutes. At the time, a scientifically verified alert by the USGS could take anywhere from two to twenty minutes. In the case of the 2011 Japan earthquake, the USGS first detected the disaster 3.8 minutes after the first tremor and sent out its first official warning of a tsunami in just under ten minutes.
Quake detection by tweets works because it is such an “OMG” experience that most people feel compelled to share it with others. It is the one of the most interesting examples of how strangers are brought together by social media technologies into an instant, ad hoc network of sensors. But relying on people as sensors has its limits. Thousands of quakes are either too small to produce noticeable shaking or they take place in remote regions. No tweets means no quake is reported. Tremors in urban centres, where everyone has a smartphone, are more readily reported. When there was an earthquake in Marina Del Rey, California, in July 2012, TED noticed it within twenty-four seconds as an average of two thousand tweets per minute was sent. It took TED two minutes and thirty seconds to discern a similar tremor in Indonesia, where there was only an average of 127 tweets per minute. Once the world is alerted to a crisis, the emergency response kicks in.
At 5 P.M. local time, photographer Frederic Dupoux sent out what was possibly the first recorded tweet of an event that would reshape Haiti forever. “On shiet [sic] heavy earthquake right now! In Haiti,” he wrote on January 12, 2010. Within minutes, dozens of people rushed to report on what was happening. “Earthquake 7 Richter scale just happening #Haiti,” said FutureHaiti. In those first few hours, social media was one of the few ways to get any sense of the impact of the earthquake. In forty seconds, 70 per cent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, lay in ruins, as did other towns and cities. An estimated 220,000 died and 1.5 million became homeless.
As the international community geared up to help, Haitians sent hundreds of thousands of text messages, tweets, videos and images, composing a vivid immediate picture of the devastation. Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, most Haitian households had access to a cell phone. Only a third of cell towers in Port-au-Prince survived the quake, but the network was quickly repaired. Among the tales of survival was the story of a Canadian woman trapped under rubble. She managed to send a text message to the Foreign Affairs office in Ottawa, some three thousand kilometres away. She told them she was safe and gave her location. The message was relayed to Canadian diplomats in Haiti, who quickly arranged her rescue.
With reports from citizens gathered from text messages, Twitter and Facebook, relief workers were able to map needs as they arose. When the relief teams got to Haiti, some then used social media to help coordinate where to send doctors, patients and medical supplies. “Without information sharing, there can be no coordination. If we are not talking to each other and sharing information, then we go back thirty years,” reflected Ramiro Galvez, who was in charge of operations for the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination mission during the Haiti disaster.
Thirty years ago, they would depend on reaching affected areas, making notes on clipboards and using radios to send the information back to base, where someone added pins on a paper map to document the crisis. In 2010, the wealth of information from people caught in the disaster helped to mitigate the impact and speed up recovery. “On the timeline of the Internet’s evolution, the 2010 Haiti earthquake response will be remembered as the moment when the level of access to mobile and online communication enabled a kind of collective intelligence to emerge,” concluded the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in a report for the United Nations Foundation.
The Haiti earthquake wasn’t the first time when people in the midst of a natural disaster turned to new communication technologies. A handful of residents used Twitter at the time of the 2007 southern California wildfires that destroyed nearly 1,500 homes. Far more were tweeting a year later, as Hurricanes Gustav and Ike struck the coasts of Louisiana and Texas in September. With Haiti, the world sat up and took note of how a real-time communications network can literally save lives, but also challenge agencies unaccustomed to coping with so much instant information. A huge amount of data needs to be collected and analyzed in a timely manner. It then needs to be added to the array of information sources already used by relief agencies to direct the appropriate resources to where they are needed.
The speed and volume of messages in the immediate aftermath of a disaster can help or hinder. Vital updates and appeals for help are mixed in with irrelevant information and spam messages, making it hard to separate the important from the trivial from the redundant in a constantly updating stream of data. During the crisis in Haiti, one of the challenges for the rescuers was the number of false leads about people who were still alive but trapped in the rubble. Many came from family members who wanted help in recovering the body of a dead relative. The problem shifts from not having enough information to collating and analyzing a flash flood of data. But there are patterns that can help to extract knowledge from raw, real-time data.
On the evening of October 29, 2012, as Superstorm Sandy hit the eastern seaboard of the U.S., a Con Edison substation exploded in Manhattan’s East Village. It plunged much of lower Manhattan into darkness. Around the same time, use of Twitter in New York went through the roof. Millions were without power, but they could still connect to the Internet on their cell phones and tablets. Over the night and the coming days, Twitter once again emerged as a main channel to spread information and updates from the authorities, media and ordinary citizens. There were more than twenty million tweets about the storm between October 27 and November 1, double the number from earlier in the week. The torrent of constant updates on Twitter looks like chaos itself. But there is a rhythm to the messages. Understanding the pulse of tweets during a crisis helps to identify and focus on potentially lifesaving information.
The first wave in a crisis is made up of eyewitness accounts from those in the eye of the storm. People living through the disaster are driven to share their shock, warn others or appeal for help. Tweets from Miyagi, the area worst affected by the 2011 Japanese quake, captured the horror of the day. “We’ve been having frequent aftershocks. A tsunami alarm has been announced. Escape immediately,” urged one message. Another read: “Buildings are burning and this is like a battlefield.” Among the real-time reports were dramatic appeals for help. “We’re on the 7th floor of Inawashiro Hospital, but because of the risen sea level, we’re stuck. Help us!!”
These firsthand accounts tend to account for only a minority of the overall volume. Such messages are soon overtaken by others providing information about a crisis. Tweets sharing news and information tend to make up the largest number of messages. During Superstorm Sandy, such messages accounted for a third of all tweets. Some are updates about the latest developments, while others give background and context. Official reports are complemented, rather than usurped, by first-person observations. Mixed in with updates from news outlets and the authorities are tidbits from citizens providing detailed local information, from fallen trees to downed power lines. When storms battered Memphis in April 2011, residents shared updates on the latest weather conditions in their neighbourhood using the #memstorm hashtag. They filled a gap left by news outlets and officials by taking a microscopic look at the areas affected by the storms.
It has also become common for people to shoot photos and videos of a disaster to share with the world. Just about every cell phone has a camera, making it easy to take a snapshot and post it online. During Sandy, the second-largest number of tweets involved people sharing photos or videos. There were photos of flooded streets and of local landmarks submerged by water as people documented the disaster. The images create a vivid, visual record of a crisis as it happens. But it also gives rise to faked images, though others then heavily contest these on Twitter.
The volume of messages on Twitter during a crisis is deceptive. Not only are a small minority from people actually on the ground, but many others are not original messages. Instead, they are retweets as people pass on the messages of others. At the time of the floods in Queensland, Australia, in January 2011, 50 to 60 per cent of messages with the #qldfloods hashtag were retweets. The retweet works as an informal recommendation system used to make some information more visible. People come together as a transient news crowd on Twitter to make sense of an event, filter relevant information and spread it via their networks. Concerned citizens take it upon themselves to focus almost exclusively on amplifying emergency information, usually by posting statements from the media and emergency service providers. Time-sensitive information can get a boost and reach a much wider audience than if it were just sent by a journalist or official.
As news of a disaster sinks in, there are messages of support and condolences. But some also turn to humour, which is known to be one of the ways of coping at times of adversity. In Australia, one of the hashtags used to talk about the Queensland floods was #thebigwet. In the U.S., people poked fun at Superstorm Sandy. Some 14 per cent of tweets at the time involved jokes, such as wondering if the hit song “Gangnam Style” was just a giant rain dance that had caused the hurricane. While humour can defuse a stressful situation, the joking is tempered by the severity of a crisis.
Taken together, the rhythms of real time show how Twitter becomes a place to come together when everyday societal bonds are strained. It serves as a fleeting town square for people to share their sorrow, fear and hopes. In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, there is an urgent need not just to receive information but also to share stories of survival and hope, as well as messages of sympathy and support. People turn to social media to restore the fabric of community shattered during a natural disaster. “We have something in common, and it allows us to feel connected,” said a Memphis resident after the 2011 storms. “We share stories, photos, happenings at the moment. I think it brings a continuity to the city we haven’t had before.”
The experiences shared by those caught up in a disaster tell a story of citizens coming together, of everyday acts of kindness and courage as neighbours seek to help those in need. Knowing how people act at such times is crucial in dealing with the aftermath of a crisis. Through the lens of social media, the story of how people behave in the face of adversity is a far cry from the archetypal disaster movie. Fictional tales of disaster are filled with terrified mobs and helpless victims. The way these stories have been told over the ages in Elizabethan plays, newspapers and B-movies presents a picture that is often out of sync with what really happens in times of crisis.
The narrative of a typical disaster movie is all too familiar, be it a volcanic eruption, an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, a gigantic Godzilla thundering through Manhattan or lurching zombies advancing on survivors who are too scared to move. On screen will be people fleeing, pushing others out of the way, while others take advantage of the chaos to loot shops and grab whatever they can. A disaster provides the setting for stirring stories of valour and woe against a backdrop of panic, with the requisite cast of heroes and villains.
The fictional tales on screen are reinforced by media coverage of real-life crises. Disasters make for good stories for journalists, just as they do for Hollywood producers. A crisis provides strong visuals of destroyed homes and dazed victims, in a state of shock, unable to look after themselves. Reporters often speak of the dangers of looting and efforts by law enforcement to restore order. It is an irresistible narrative that makes for human-interest stories that resonate with the audience. Except that the narrative is usually far from accurate. Media reports and fictional accounts present a distorted picture of what happens by focusing on the most dramatic and exciting elements of a crisis. Much more attention is paid to scenes of destruction than to areas that have made it through unscathed.
The upshot is disaster myths that people believe are true and that are perpetuated in the media and popular culture. The myths are so prevalent in society that people believe certain things happen during a disaster. A seminal study in the 1970s showed how far the media influenced people’s beliefs. Sociologists from the University of Delaware and Ohio State carried out a survey of 354 residents of New Castle County in Delaware. Most of them had no direct experience of a disaster. Instead, they relied on television and newspapers for their information about disasters. The sociologists found that eight out of ten people thought panic was a major problem. Many expected survivors to be in a state of shock and dependent on local officials and relief agencies. The study is just one in a raft of work that shows that preconceived notions about disasters are essentially wrong.
Yet these myths keep resurfacing because they make for compelling stories for both the movie and the news industries. Since most have never been through an earthquake or hurricane, their views come from what they see in films and in the media. When there is a lack of information, people will tend to fear the worst. The result is a disconnect between how we think people behave in times of crisis and what they actually do. One widely held belief is that people always behave irrationally. Somehow, disaster seems synonymous with the notion of hordes frantically running for their lives, every person for themselves, without thinking about others.
People do flee in the face of imminent danger. When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, New Yorkers in downtown Manhattan ran for their lives. It is a natural and rational response to get out of harm’s way. This type of behaviour tends to be portrayed as panic. The reality is that people do not resort to the type of mindless flight of hysterical crowds often seen in movies. More often than not, residents tend to ignore warnings of an impending calamity and disregard calls to evacuate the area. The people hit by a disaster are far from helpless victims. The opposite tends to be true, with survivors of a tragedy being the first to take care of the injured and search for survivors.
One of the earliest examples of how social media challenges the media narrative was during the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. In the early hours of Monday, April 16, the deadliest school massacre in U.S. history by a single gunman shattered the stillness of the campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. In two separate attacks, undergraduate student Seung Hui Cho killed thirty-two students and faculty and wounded seventeen more before turning his gun on himself. An official report into the tragedy found that Cho, a South Korean national with U.S. permanent residency, had a history of mental health problems.
Early on that Monday morning, Cho fatally wounded his first victim, Emily Hilscher, in her room in a residence. A residential assistant, Ryan Christopher Clark, was also killed. Cho then went back to his room to change out of his bloody clothes and pick up a backpack with two semiautomatic handguns, almost four hundred rounds of ammunition and several chains and locks. He proceeded to Norris Hall, where he chained the main entrances and went from classroom to classroom, firing at students and professors.
The scale and nature of the tragedy shocked the nation. Disbelief, outrage, grief and recriminations followed as people tried to make sense of what had happened. One student, Jamal Albarghouti, captured part of the drama on video using his cell phone camera. The grainy video, broadcast on CNN, showed police outside campus buildings, with the sounds of gunfire in the distance. “This place is in a state of panic,” said a student featured on CNN, Shaver Deyerle. “Nobody knew what was going on at first.”
Behind the scenes, though, students turned to the Internet to figure out what was happening on campus. Facebook was still in its early days, but was becoming increasingly popular among college kids. Rather than panicking or being paralyzed by fear, students holed up in dorms or in classrooms turned to Facebook to counter the anxiety that comes from a lack of information during a crisis. Some set up Facebook groups to create a virtual meeting place to connect, get to know each other and discuss common concerns. The group I’m OK at VT served as a place for students to tell others that they were safe. Another popular group was Prayers for VT, where people could share their grief and condolences.
One of the focal points for the students became a discussion thread in the latter group entitled “You know a student is confirmed dead?” “My roommate just found out that he lost a very dear friend MR pray for her family and her soul tonight … thank you,” read one message. Another described how the sender heard about one of the victims from the victim’s girlfriend: “I just finished speaking with his girlfriend, and it appears JH is a fatality as well. God rest his soul.” Some students monitored other Facebook groups and served as information brokers, gathering information and reporting back to the Prayers for VT group. “RS has reported to another Facebook group,” read one update.
During the tense and traumatic morning of April 16, students turned to Facebook to try to find answers to a pressing question: Are my friends safe? The list of victims compiled by the students in various Facebook groups was never incorrect. Far from spreading rumours and speculation, the students worked together in a concentrated, well-intentioned and serious manner to provide timely and accurate information. The use of social media in the hours following the Virginia Tech shootings made visible what researchers who study disasters have always known. Under pressure, people are remarkably resilient and will rise to the occasion to help others.
In the hours after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Shinya Takatori sent out a steady stream of messages and chatted with others in Japanese. He used Twitter to check on the condition of friends, offer comfort and share information about relief efforts. By the evening, Shinya was reflecting on how social media had affected his experience of the disaster. Twitter turned out to be an invaluable tool that helped him make it through a nerve-racking day. “Thanks to Twitter, I found out things like my friend in Ishinomaki is on the roof of his house and is waiting for help because of a flooded first floor, and that friends in Natori are safe. We who are removed from the situation might have more info. Keep us posted! If someone from Sendai is safe, too, let us know. Keep the information coming!”
The information has kept on coming. When a crisis shakes the world, there is an instant flare-up in activity on Twitter. Social media swings into action as a nervous system for the planet. When the world hiccups, Twitter twitches. The upsurge in messages serves as an early warning system that can help emergency services act quickly. At times of crisis, accurate and reliable information about the location and needs of victims is at a premium. Facts have a short shelf life. In the hours and days after a disaster, needs change as people are found, requiring medical attention, clean water and food. For the emergency services, monitoring social networks offers a real-time feed of data that can help inform rescue efforts and the allocation of scarce resources.
When a crisis stretches the normal bonds of a community, people caught up in the event turn to whatever technologies are available to connect and communicate. The cell phone and a sporadic Internet connection tend to be the only forms of communication still functioning after a disaster. When no voice calls can make it through, sometimes the only thing that still works is a 140-character text sent to Twitter. The volume and mix of messages depends on the type of disaster and its location. There will be far more tweets from cities with good cell phone service than from more remote areas.
But some patchy information is better than none in the news vacuum immediately after a disaster. Taken in aggregate, the instant snapshots shared on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube generate a living representation of the concerns, priorities and anxieties of everyday citizens in the aftermath of a catastrophe. They are visible for all to see on social media, contradicting stereotypical portrayals of panicked and helpless victims. Social media changes the experience of a disaster for those most affected by it. But it also affects everyone else at a distance from the event.
Many of the people active on Twitter during a crisis are nowhere near its geographical location or have any direct experience of it. Instead, they are taking on the role of distant witnesses, brought together by a shared interest or fascination by a major news event. From the safety of their home or office, they get involved in the crisis by monitoring social media and choosing relevant bits of information to bring to the attention of others. The mechanics of Twitter enables anyone to be part of a community drawn together by common interest.
When Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing in March 2014, the story made headlines across the world and galvanized an international search-and-rescue effort. There was nothing to suggest anything out of the ordinary when the Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing just after noon on March 8. There were 239 people on board, including the twelve crew members. The final words from the cockpit as it left Malaysian airspace were a standard and routine sign-off: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
The disappearance of MH370 captured the imagination of the public. It seemed like something out of the plot of the TV series Lost. In today’s wired world, how could an airliner with 239 people simply vanish? Twitter became a public square for the circulation of news updates and speculation about what might have happened. In the three weeks following its disappearance, there were more than five million tweets with the #mh370 hashtag. But only a million were original messages, many of them from media organizations sharing the latest news. The remaining 80 per cent were retweets.
During the MH370 mystery, Twitter users were acting as distant witnesses, picking out relevant announcements and links to pass on to their social networks as events happened. Real time turns a crisis into a drama where anyone can play a role in the spread of information. In the past, the public’s experience of a crisis came largely through newspapers, television and radio. Social media enables people to interact with the news as every twist and turn is shared on Twitter. A crisis situation can seem more real and more immersive when concerned individuals can be part of the urgency and drama as it plays out in real time. Every twist and turn is described, discussed and dissected on an instant news network that is open to everyone, for better or worse.