Twitter for Public Safety & Emergency Management

This entry to the "Emergency Preparedness Today" blog explores the use of one new communication tool to improve emergency preparedness and response capabilities within a particular pandemic: the April 2009 swine influenza A (H1N1) outbreak. Rather than dismiss the new ways of communicating through internet- and mobile-data-driven utilities such as Twitter, Joseph Mazzarella urges that "these social networks...may offer emergency management and public safety organizations...another potentially powerful and effective communications utility to add to their communications tool chest."

As described on its website, "Twitter is a service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" With Twitter®, people can follow one another and receive messages from their network of friends in real time. Twitter is already being used in certain public safety contexts in both planned and spontaneous ways. For example, in addition to a number of police departments in the United States (US), local and state Offices of Emergency Management have rolled out their own Twitter alert-based sites. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also use Twitter as a mass communications tool.

Mazzarella describes several applications to illustrate the potential utility that Twitter may offer in the realm of emergency response and public safety. As a tool for information gathering and quick interactive information updating, Twitter was widely used during the 2007 Southern California wildfires to track and report fire movements in real time and alert people of potential oncoming danger. This type of alert could be extended into an interactive, web-based information gathering portal through which the public can contribute information, and also follow incident updates.

The author stresses that integrating Twitter into a public safety or emergency management environment raises considerations including security and privacy, user identity management and authentication, evidence preservation and chain of custody, and practical possession and control matters. As with any official public communications outlet, an integrated administrative review and approval workflow component is important to ensure that appropriate quality control standards, legal review requirements, and internal policies are followed, obtained, and recorded. In the case where Twitter might be used to collect information from the public, concerns include being able to process potentially large volumes of information that may be submitted, as well as being able to determine its relevancy, verify or assess its likely accuracy and truthfulness, and assess its actionable value in a timely manner.

These considerations notwithstanding, Mazzarella concludes that "it is reasonable to expect the use of Twitter® to continue to rapidly grow within the public safety and emergency management space primarily as an adjunct to existing mass alerting modalities. It is further likely that Twitter® can and will be used by innovative agencies as a means to enhance information gathering through public participation - in essence enabling 'virtual neighborhood watch' capabilities. However, it is very unlikely Twitter® could be adopted for any internal public safety and emergency management communications use because of the additional security, data integrity assurance, information management and control, and most importantly, reliability needs."