Digital Nudging in Social Media Disaster Communication

Milad Mirbabaie,Stefan Stieglitz,Deborah Bunker,Tanja Rose,Christian Ehnis

doi:10.1007/s10796-020-10062-z

Milad Mirbabaie, Stefan Stieglitz + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-020-10062-z

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Abstract

Social media has become an important channel of communication in emergency and disaster management. Emergency Management Agencies can distribute helpful and important information to the general public and also gather information to enrich their management efforts. This, however, remains challenging since several communication-related barriers occur. This study investigates how the concept of Nudging, a form of behaviour adjustment, can be applied to address these barriers. A Systematic Literature Review and qualitative social media data analysis methods were applied to explore the potential of digital nudges on social media. Twelve forms of digital nudges could be identified in the data that influenced the visibility of the messages they occurred in. The results suggest that Digital Nudging on Social Media is a promising approach to use in emergency and disaster communication.

Highlights

Social Media is an important communication channel during emergency and other crisis events
The objective of our paper is to highlight initial insights into: (1) how does and can digital nudging take place in usergenerated content on social media platforms dealing with emergency and disaster communications (EDC); and (2) how can digital nudging be used by emergency management agencies (EMA) in EDC to support EDM efforts
Within our study we apply this concept of digital nudging to better understand: RQ 1: How can digital nudging be used in social media during emergency events and disasters? RQ 2: How can social media nudging be used in emergency and disaster communication to support emergency management agencies?

Summary

Introduction

Social Media is an important communication channel during emergency and other crisis events. EMA face several challenges, including the need to ensure their messages reach everyone, so the community has trustworthy situational awareness to make the right decisions. User-generated content produced in social media during and shortly after extreme events presents another challenge. Both the high quantity and diverse quality of information that is generated on social media makes it hard for EMA, who often lack the resources and skills to process such large amounts of information (Stieglitz et al, 2018b), to identify, analyse, respond to and propagate reliable, trustworthy and accurate information. It is undisputed that effective communication and goal-oriented decision-making is fundamental for the management of a crisis or disaster (Grebennik et al, 2019; Lazreg et al, 2018) and to ensure community safety and welfare

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