Abstract
ABSTRACT the immediate aftermath of crisis events, there is a pressing demand among the public for information about what is unfolding. In such moments “information holes” occur, people and organizations collaborate to try to fill these in real time by sharing information. In this article, we approach such gaps not merely as the product of the actual lack of information, but as generated by the algorithmically underpinned social media platforms as such, and by the user behaviors that they proliferate. The lack of information is the result of the noisy and fragmented patchwork of information that social media platforms can generate. In this paper, we draw on a case study of one particular case of a false terrorism alarm and its unfolding on Twitter, that took place in London’s Oxford Circus underground station in November of 2017. Using a combination of computational and interpretive methods – analyzing social network structure as well as textual expressions – we find that certain logics of platforms may affect emergency management and the work of emergency responders negatively.
Highlights
In today’s age of deep mediatization, more and more aspects of society are saturated with digital communication media in ways that transform our social domains in quite drastic ways (Couldry & Hepp, 2017)
We have drawn on a particular case study to illustrate the usefulness of sociotechnical understandings of processes of emergency response more broadly
We mean by this that well-known and understood perspectives on the social psychology of acute events, can be fruitfully combined with well-documented understandings of the logics of social media platforms
Summary
In today’s age of deep mediatization, more and more aspects of society are saturated with digital communication media in ways that transform our social domains in quite drastic ways (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). We approach such gaps not merely as the product of the actual lack of information, but as generated by the algorithmically underpinned social media platforms as such, and by the user behaviors that they prolifer ate.
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