MIT Laboratory for Social Machines, a bet to avoid a mayor emergency in Twitter

The MIT Media Lab announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), whose main goal would be the creation of programs aimed to develop collaborative technologies to tackle complex social problems, as you can read here. This would be great news for the emergency management world as long as Twitter itself developes new technologies  capable of detecting a big streaming growing up in Twitter. Once we have this problem solve, it would turn into the best tool for PIOs to control rumors when a disaster strikes. If we admit that Twitter is the biggest web of reporters existing ever (with all their drawbacks) and that it offers a synchronized experience, as @dkroy explained in #TATGranada2014, there is an urgent need to put an order in this huge stream of information. We’ll try to explain in this post (co written with @LuisSerranoR) why and how this new tool may help.

It is true that there are some ways to monitor conversation in social media (we are talking about Twitter basically here) when a disaster strikes. We can add a column either in Hoosuite or Tweecked with a Hashtag (ie: #Sandy, #yycflood) and this helps to monitor the conversation. I always tell my students that a tweet without a Hashtag is like going to a Big Store without a directory indicating you where the goods are. If you want to buy shoes you go to the shoe section- not to the bakery. So if you want to follow the news of a Hurricane your follow the HT with its name.

We could also follow the official source of information (usually the Government, local authority, and so on) or a list of influencers and people we trust as a reliable source of information, but still, we cannot stop rumors because we lack relevant information: where and when (the exact time) the tweet was posted being the more important. Moreover, we need to detect the rumor going viral from the very beginning.

Time is relevant to stop rumors going viral

The thing is we don’t have any app capable of detecting a huge stream of (false- not trusted) information expanding at an incredible speed. By the time we detect a rumor in social media, it would have been retweed thousands of times; it would have become viral and would have caused undesirable effects. We would be lucky if we can still control the situation if a big disaster strikes, considering the speed of Twitter. Just remember the 6.000 tweet per second in the aftermath of Japan’s earthquake .That's why Twitter would the one to offer the Technological solution.

Using a HT helps, but it is no enough to stop rumors

What I describe above is a way to follow only the information of a topic and spare the rest. But, as explained, besides detecting the rumor stream there are some other issues to solve: where and when a tweet was posted (most tweets are not geolocated); whether the information delivered is updated, relevant, and trustful and who is the source of information (when this is not indicated). Our main problem remains. We need a lot of hands (VOST teams) to stop rumor spreading through social media.

As @LuisSerranoL says, one day we will face a mayor disaster amd rumors will be so big that we will not be capable of controlling them. Unless we find a way to really scrutinize social media and get the information delivered in a manner we can decide what is worth and what is rubbish at the speed needed to stop a mayor disaster. 

500 million tweets per day and 241 million users deserve a solution to the Twitter conundrum, especially when we are talking of saving their lives, properties and the enviorenment. It is on Twitter's hands to provide a tool that helps emergency managers making civil protection to save  lives using social media.

If Twitter succeeds in creating this rumor detector, the microblogging site would move from being just a mass media to effectively save lives in emergencies. This step would be the base above which  Public Administration and VOST teams all over the world would build a holistic strategy to stop rumors.

As @dkroy heard  at #TATGranada14 from @LuisSerranoR speech: “100 firefighters cannot stop a tsunami without the help of they who control the web”. The Laboratory for Social Machines is undoubtedly a huge step to fulfill this goal.

Citizen journalism?

Social media have come to stay and they have changed completely the landscape when a disaster strikes.  We all know wonderful examples of citizens being rescued thanks to social media geolocated post (as in Turkey) as well as the possibility to add information that can help emergency services to get a better picture of what’s going on thanks to these post in social media by anonymous people. Social media saves lives and this is out of discussion nowadays. What I like to discuss today is the name we call that activity consisting, basically, on anyone armed with a smartphone (tablet, computer, etc) sharing text, pictures or video through social media. To have a better idea of the concept, you can see Tony Rogers post, whose content I basically agree.

I’ve been thinking for quite a time in the term citizen journalism and I came to the conclusion that we really should find a better name for this activity. It sounds to me that we all see the advantages when the story has a happy ending. Let me just remind you that we live in the era of co-creation, and thanks to social media, we have a great opportunity to be part of the story rather than to be told what  the commercial brands used to sell.

The message is not unilateral anymore, and that is good. Thanks to this co-creation process the way we watch TV or go a show live is a completely different experience and this is great for many reasons.

I believe that we all could agree till here. But what happen when we are talking of an emergency and there are people sharing pictures though social media saying things like a person has died during the explosion or blood is needed at some point and this information is not true? Who is responsible of these rumors being spread through social media? Obviously, they who share the information. But it is when this occurs when we all start thinking whether this is journalism or it is something else.

In the picture above, someboy called @ineslr73 shares a picture of a building in Madrid where an explosion has taken place and says: "It seems that there are dead people".

She argues with Madrid 112 Press Manager, @LuisSerranoR, who asks her not to spread rumor nor to create social alarm. In a more than casual tone ( to me an offensive one)  she offers to delete the picture.

She explained then that it has been her sister who lives near the building and who has taken the picture.

This is a citizen armed with a smartphone sharing a picture from a non trusted source of information and creating social alarm. It is clear to me that she has not even thought for a second of those people who live in the building neither on their families. Would you call that (citizen) journalism?

Shoemakers make shoes, journalists do journalism

I am not saying, by any means, that ordinary citizens shouldn’t use social media when an emergency strikes, nor that what they share is worthless. I like to make it clear that social media are good value in these cases as I have always written in this blog. To put but one example, VOST teams work very well in emergencies and many of its members are not journalist.  The difference here is that they use official sources. As we (the journalists) do, they corroborate the source of the information, something that, generally speaking, is not an issue for the ordinary citizens, as shows the example above. Let’s say that people, and to some extend (see below) the media, rush to share information without thinking twice.

Besides, it is good when citizens use social media during a disaster because it helps the authorities and firsts responders to make civil protection. At the same time, the citizens are empowered by being capable to access the information they need to protect themselves through social media.

Is journalism at a loose end? Where is the journalism reputation?

It caught my attention the undeniable fact that some journalists and media seem to have forgotten how to do our job. Since social media started it seems to me that the old uses of corroborating the source of information and the rest of good practices what we learned at College and working in traditional media are old fashioned. Why is that? We know why: due to the urgent need to be the first source of information, competing in Twitter, what anyone armed with a smartphone (journalist or not, including the- to me misnamed- citizen journalism)

You can see examples of what I mean here  and in the picture below.

The picture of the former president of Venezuela
Hugo Chavez is a fake

  

When the first newspaper in Spain has reached the point to publish a false picture of former President Hugo Chavez there is little more to say… not to remember the great amount of false pictures uploaded to social media of hurricane Sandy.

The misnamed revolutionary tax versus (the misnamed?) citizen journalism

During Franco dictatorship , after the Spanish Civil War, many of you would remember that here in Spain we have a huge problem in the North of Spain (Basque Country), with a terrorist band called ETA. They used to blackmail the businessmen who have their industries in the Basque Country and that blackmailing was called “The revolutionary task”.  In the 90’s I used to work for a Radio Station in Madrid and we (the journalist) started to called that the “misnamed revolutionary tax”. For one simple reason: that was not a tax.

From my point of view, citizen journalism is not journalism. Journalism is what journalists practice. What the citizen share, using their right to express themselves using social media, is something else. Besides the terminology issue, if we are talking about emergencies, “you do need to watch what people post”, as Steve Outing explains so well in this interesting article.

What do you think?