Build a Crisis Crowdsourcing Validation Toolbox

The credibility of crowdsourced crisis and social media information is a concern for participating Canadian government agencies, and these agencies indicated that they would not, or do not, use this information for actionable decisions until it has been validated. To address these concerns, agencies should include validation tools in their toolbox for collecting and analyzing any form of crowdsourced information (Participant H, 2015; Participant L, 2015). These tools are described in Table 11.

Table 11. Validation tools that should be added to emergency managers' social media monitoring toolbox.

VALIDATION TOOL EXAMPLES DESCRIPTION OR PURPOSE MULTIPLE SOCIAL

MEDIA PLATFORMS Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, Vine, Instagram, Flickr

Crosscheck posts across all platforms

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Hootsuite, Sprout Social,

Tweetdeck Conduct hashtag and geo-fenced searches, remove re-tweets, monitor trends (Participants A, F, H, P, T, 2015) GEOGRAPHIC

INFORMATION Geotagged posts and geo-fenced search results plotted on a map

Corroborate reports that are nearby, different angles/perspectives provided from different locations

ATTACHMENTS Photos, videos Provide a better impression of the extent of damage and impact on a municipality USER INFORMATION Posting history, number

of followers

Information on user accounts provides an indicator of “who they are,” and indicates their history of posting valid or invalid information

TRUSTED SOURCES News, radio, credible

users These sources have previously been verified and deemed credible, their information is trustworthy

CROWDSOURCING VERIFICATION TOOLS

Verily (https://veri.ly/) Online platform that enlists volunteers to verify social media information about a specific humanitarian crisis event (Popoola et al., 2013)

Factors that increase the credibility of crowdsourcing information were identified by participants as trends (i.e. increasing numbers of reports about an incident), photographs, and geographic information, and available information on the user’s account (Participants E, H, L, O, 2015). Sharing pictures and videos provides an added level of credibility, however verification of these photos and videos themselves must by practiced due to the issue of fake photos described previously (Participant H, 2015; Participant L, 2015). Geographic information allows agencies to plot the information onto a map, where trends can be identified (Participant H, 2015), and officials can determine whether a user is credible based on information provided on their social media account, such as number of followers, and history of putting out valid information (Participant H, 2015).

It is important to build a list of trusted sources because it is easier to accept information from sources that have already been verified and are considered credible than from unknown sources (Participants F, H, J, K, L, P, R, 2015). It was also mentioned by two participants that social media, in particular, can be self-correcting in nature (Participant S, 2015; Participant T, 2015). For example, one city-level Emergency Preparedness Coordinator described how they will see citizens correct each other on social media; the citizens will often question or debate each other’s posts and provide updated or corrected information based on their own ground-truthing (Participant S, 2015). Similar conclusions have been made in the literature that support these participants’ sentiments (Goodchild, 2008; Hall, Chipeniuk, Feick, Leahy, & Deparday, 2010). However, since there is still the possibility for rumours to continue to spread despite the self-correcting nature of social media and other crowdsourcing platforms, agencies still “need to be prepared to correct the information” (Participant T, 2015).

To address concerns around the correctness and accuracy of crowdsourced information, agencies can formulate “reporting guidelines” for citizens to follow when reporting information over social media or any other crowdsourcing platform, as was done by the participating federal level agency to increase the quality of reports received through Twitter (Participant L, 2015). Additionally, agencies can implement verification methods if they are feasible (Burns & Shanley, 2012; Johnson & Sieber, 2013). In general, however, it has been found by experienced users of crisis crowdsourcing that the data is often just as accurate, or more accurate, than authoritative data (Burns & Shanley, 2012). As

such, while concerns about crowdsourced data credibility and quality are legitimate, agencies can address these concerns by implementing validation tools such as those listed in Table 11 so that they can continue to explore and experiment with crowdsourcing and social media for emergency management.

3.7 Conclusions

The literature shows that there are many barriers and constraints associated with the government adoption of crisis crowdsourcing and social media for crisis communication. The results for this study provide a Canadian perspective to these barriers and constraints, and identify barriers that are unique to Canadian agencies. Participating agencies in Canada are most concerned with the credibility of crowdsourced information, and are seeking out ways to ensure that the information is credible. Participating agencies who have little to no experience with social media tend to have a greater distrust of crowdsourced information than those who are fully engaged with social media for information dissemination and monitoring.

When a government agency is looking into developing a crowdsourcing model for crisis communication, they must assess three general areas of concern that can determine the success of the project. These three areas of concern are organizational factors, demographic factors, and hazard risk factors and are presented in the form of a readiness assessment scheme. Based on the assessment of these factors, the agency can pinpoint the most prevalent barriers to the crowdsourcing project, and formulate plans to address them.

In response to the barriers and constraints that were identified, some solutions were formulated to ease the adoption of crisis crowdsourcing by Canadian agencies. Agencies should adopt the bottom-up model for inspiring change and launching crisis crowdsourcing projects as they are more likely to succeed. However, some agencies may simply not have the adequate resources to fully implement a crisis crowdsourcing model, a such, these agencies should build partnerships with neighbouring government agencies, 311 and 211, and NGO’s such as CanVOST and the Red Cross. In this way, government agencies can benefit from resource and task sharing. Finally, a validation toolbox can help ease concerns around the credibility of crowdsourced information.