Local emergency management social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sean Hildebrand, PhD; Brandon Waite, PhD

doi:10.5055/jem.0587

Authors

Sean Hildebrand, PhD https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0381-6158
Brandon Waite, PhD

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.0587

Keywords:

social media, COVID-19, communication, local emergency management

Abstract

The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Emergency Management is to assess the state of disaster preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article adds to this discussion by examining the results of a national survey of emergency managers in the United States regarding the social media platforms they use to communicate information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, how proficient they feel using them, and what value they see in these technologies during the times of crisis. The authors’ findings help make sense of government responses to the pandemic, as well as contribute to the body of literature on communication and emergency management more broadly. Furthermore, their findings have important implications for emergency management practitioners and educators.

Author Biographies

Sean Hildebrand, PhD

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Internship Coordinator, Public Administration/American Politics, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana

Brandon Waite, PhD

Associate Professor of Political Science, American Politics/Public Administration, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana

References

Musser J, O’Reilly T: Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006.

Wukich C: Social media use in emergency management. J Emerg Manag. 2015; 13(4): 281-294.

Perrin A, Anderson M: Share of US adults using social media, including Facebook, unchanged since 2018. 2019. Available at https://pewrsr.ch/2VxJuJ3. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Lunden I: Nextdoor, now in 160,000 neighborhoods globally, expands to Germany. TechCrunch. 2017. Available at https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/nextdoor-now-in-160000-neighborhoods-globally-expands-to-germany/?ncid=rss. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Houston JB, Hawthorne J, Perreault MF, et al.: Social media and disasters: A functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research. Disasters. 2015; 39(1): 1-22.

Adam N, Shafiq B, Staffin R: Spatial computing and social media in the context of disaster management. IEEE Intell Syst. 2012; 27: 90-96.

Harrald J, Jefferson T: Shared situational awareness in emergency management mitigation and response. In 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07), Waikoloa, HI, 2007: 23.

Lindsay BR: Social media and disasters: Current uses, future options, and policy considerations, report. 2011. Available at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R41987.pdf. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Trainor J, Subbio T: Issues in disaster science and management: A critical dialogue. 2014. Available at https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/13418. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Veil SRTB, Palenchar MJ: A work-in-process literature review: Incorporating social media in risk and crisis communication. J Contingen Crisis Manag. 2011; 19(2): 110-122.

Verma S, Vieweg S, Corvey WJ, et al.: Natural Language Processing to the Rescue? Extracting “Situational Awareness” Tweets During Mass Emergency. ICWSM, 2011.

Bakshy E, Rosenn I, Marlow C, et al.: The role of social networks in information diffusion. In WWW’12—Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web, 2012.

Simon T, Goldberg A, Adini B: Socializing in emergencies—A review of the use of social media in emergency situations. Int J Inform Manag. 2015; 35(5): 609-619.

Yates D, Paquette S: Emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: A case study of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Int J Inform Manag. 2011; 31: 6-13.

Teodorescu H-N: Using analytics and social media for monitoring and mitigation of social disasters. Procedia Eng. 2015; 107: 325-334.

Panagiotopoulos P, Barnett J, Bigdeli AZ, et al.: Social media in emergency management: Twitter as a tool for communicating risks to the public. Technol Forecast Soc Change. 2016; 111: 86-96.

Liu F, Burton-Jones A, Xu D: Rumors on Social Media in Disasters: Extending Transmission to Retransmission. PACIS, 2014.

Karlova N, Fisher K: A social diffusion model of misinformation and disinformation for understanding human information behaviour. Inform Res. 2013; 18.

Kaigo M: Social media usage during disasters and social capital: Twitter and the great east Japan earthquake. Keio Commun Rev. 2012; 34: 19-35.

Davidov D, Tsur O, Rappoport A: Semi-supervised recognition of sarcastic sentences in Twitter and Amazon. In CoNLL 2010—Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings of the Conference, 2010.

Li L, Goodchild MF: The role of social networks in emergency management: A research agenda. IJISCRAM. 2010; 2: 48-58.

White C, Plotnick L: A framework to identify best practices: Social media and web 2.0 technologies in the emergency domain. IJISCRAM. 2010; 2: 37-48.

Gao H, Barbier G, Goolsby R: Harnessing the crowdsourcing power of social media for disaster relief. Intelligent systems. IEEE. 2011; 26: 10-14.

Sutton J, Palen L, Shklovski I: Backchannels on the front lines: Emergent uses of social media in the 2007 Southern California Wildfires. In Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference, 2008.

St. Denis L, Palen L, Anderson KM: Mastering Social Media: An Analysis of Jefferson County’s Communications during the 2013 Colorado Floods. ISCRAM, 2014.

Athanasia N, Stavros P: Twitter as an instrument for crisis response: The Typhoon Haiyan case study. In ISCRAM 2015 Conference, Proceedings of the Conference, 2015.

Hildebrand S: The effective use of communication tools during a long-term campus emergency. Nat Hazards. 2017; 88(1): 21-18.

Marsh G, Carlson NL, Jane Irons E: A comparison of the aftermath of hurricanes Rita and Ike: University administrator’s perspectives. Natl Soc Sci J. 2010; 35(1): 86-92.

Young J: Emergency-alert system malfunctions after fatal shootings at Louisiana state university with some messages never arriving. Available at http://www.chronicle.com/article/Emergency-Alert-System/123522. Accessed January 6, 2021.

Qu Y, Wu P, Wang X: Online community response to major disaster: A study of Tianya forum in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 2009. Available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4755366. Accessed July 22, 2021.

Angel JL, Mudrazija S: Local government efforts to mitigate the novel coronavirus among older adults. J Aging Soc Policy. 2020; 32(4-5): 439-449.

Benavides AD, Nukpezah JA: How local governments are CARNG for the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic. Am Rev Public Adm. 2020; 50(6-7): 650-657.

Capano G, Howlett M, Jarvis D, et al.: Mobilizing policy (in) capacity to fight COVID-19: Understanding variations in state responses. Policy Soc. 2020; 39(3): 285-308.

Rocco P, Beland D, Waddan A: Stuck in neutral? Federalism, policy instruments, and counter-cyclical responses to COVID-19 in the United States. Policy Soc. 2020; 39(3): 458-477.

Xu HD, Basu R: How the United States flunked the COVID-19 test: Some observations and several lessons. Am Rev Public Adm. 2020; 50(6-7): 568-576.

Weible CM, Nohrstedt D, Cairney P, et al.: COVID-19 and the policy sciences: Initial reactions and perspectives. Policy Sci. 2020; 53: 225-241.

Sasangohar F, Moats J, Mehta R, et al.: Disaster ergonomics: Human factors in COVID-19 pandemic emergency management. Hum Factors. 2020; 62(7): 1061-1068.

Clemens J, Veuger S: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for State Government Tax Revenues. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 2020. Available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w27426. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Dzigbede KD, Gehl SB, Willoughby K: Disaster resiliency of US local governments: Insights to strengthen local response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Public Adm Rev. 2020; 80(4): 634-643.

Gordon T, Dadayan L, Rueben K: State and local government finances in the COVID-19 era. Natl Tax J. 2020; 73(3): 733-758.

Watson CR, Watson M, Sell TK: Public health preparedness funding: Key programs and trends from 2001 to 2017. Public Health Practice. 2017; 107(52): S165-S167.

Wolf-Fordham S: Integrating government silos: Local emergency management and public health department collaboration for emergency planning and response. Am Rev Public Adm. 2020; 50(6-7): 560-567.

Balogun J: Lessons from the USA delayed response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Afr J Reprod Health. 2020; 24(1): 14-21.

Kettl D: States divided: The implications of American federalism for COVID-19. Public Adm Rev. 2020; 80(4): 595-602.

Kirlin J: COVID-19 upends pandemic plan. Am Rev Public Adm. 2020; 50(6-7): 467-479.

Rose D, Murthy S, Brooks J, et al.: The evolution of public health management as a field of practice. Am J Public Health. 2017; 107(52): S126-S133.

Weng S-H, Ni A-Y, Ho AT-K, et al.: Responding to the coronavirus pandemic: A tale of two cities. Am Rev Public Adm. 2020; 50(6-7): 474-504.

Bell D, Weisfuse I, Hernandez-Avila M, et al.: Pandemic influenza as a 21st century urban public health crisis. Emerg Infect Dis. 2009; 15(12): 1963-1969.

Branum A, Dietz JE, Black DR: An evaluation of local incident command system personnel in a pandemic influenza. J Emerg Manag. 2010; 8(5): 39-46.

French PE: Enhancing the legitimacy of local government pandemic influenza planning through transparency and public engagement. Public Adm Rev. 2011; 71(2): 253-264.

French PE, Raymond ES: Pandemic influenza planning: An extraordinary ethical dilemma for local government officials. Public Adm Rev. 2009; 69(5): 823-830.

Iskander J, Strikas RA, Gensheimer KF, et al.: Pandemic influenza planning, United States, 1978-2008. Emerg Infect Dis. 2013; 19(6): 879-885.

Mareiniss D, Hirshon JM, Thibodeau B: Disaster planning: Potential effects of an influenza pandemic on community health care resources. Am J Disaster Med. 2009; 4(3): 163-171.

Thompson A, Faith K, Gibson J, et al.: Pandemic influenza preparedness: An ethical framework to guide decision-making. BMC Med Ethics. 2006; 7(12): 12-11.

Cook A, Cohen D: Pandemic disease: A past and future challenge to governance in the United States. Rev Policy Res. 2008; 25(5): 449-471.

Limaye RJ, Sauer M, Ali J, et al.: Building trust while influencing online COVID-19 content in the social media world. The Lancet. 2020; 2: E277-E278.

Wang Y, Hao H, Platt LS: Examining risk and crisis communications of government agencies and stakeholders during early-stages of COVID-19 on twitter. Comput Hum Behav. 2021; 114: 106568.

Merchant R, Lurie N: Social media and emergency preparedness in response to novel coronavirus. JAMA. 2020; 323(20): 2011-2012.

Chen Q, Chen M, Zhang W, et al.: Unpacking the black box: How to promote citizen engagement through government social media during the COVID-19 crisis. Comput Hum Behav. 2020; 110: 106380.

Kim DKD, Kreps G: An analysis of government communication in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic: Recommendations for effective government health risk ommunication.

World Med Health Policy. 2020; 12: 398-411.

Goel A, Gupta L: Social media in the times of COVID-19. J Clin Rheumatol. 2020; 26(6): 220-223.

Parker K, Horowitz JM, Brown A, et al.: Demographic and economic trends in urban, suburban, and rural communities. 2018. Available at https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-ruralcommunities/. Accessed December 26, 2020.

US Center for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics. 2013 NCHS urban-rural classification scheme for counties. 2014. Available at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_02/sr02_166.pdf. Accessed December 26, 2020.

Hildebrand S: Coerced confusion? Local emergency management policy implementation after September 11. J Homeland Security Emerg Manag. 2015; 12(2): 273-298.

Hildebrand S: Controlling disasters: Local emergency management perceptions about federal emergency management and homeland security actions since September 11, 2001. J Emerg Manag. 2017; 15(5): 291-309.

Hildebrand S: Are we better off? Emergency management policy implementation since September 11. J Emerg Manag. 2019; 17(6): 439-453.

Hildebrand S: Representative bureaucracy in emergency management: Attitudes about contemporary emergency management policy and politics in local agencies. J Homeland Security Emerg Manag. 2020; 17(3): 1-36.

Weaver J, Harkabus L, Braun J, et al.: An overview of a demographic study of United States emergency managers. Bull Am Meteorol Soc. 2014; 95(2): 199-203.

Wernstedt K, Roberts P, Arvai J, et al.: How emergency managers (mis?)interpret forecasts. Disasters. 2019; 43(1): 88-109.

Mergel I, Greeves B: Social Media in the Public Sector Field Guide: Designing and Implementing Strategies and Policies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.