Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The emergence of online widescale interaction in unexpected events: assistance, alliance & retreat
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Social Science Computer Review
Information control and terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter
Information Systems Frontiers
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The increased use of social media technologies over the past few years has altered the communication and information sharing activities surrounding crises. Local and non-local citizens can now create and distribute their own crisis-related information to a wide audience bypassing official communication channels. The purpose of our research is to identify patterns in citizen communications transmitted over Twitter and to identify ethical considerations of citizen participation through Twitter in response to violent crises. In a preliminary study, we examined the patterns of Twitter communications sent in response to a 2009 violent attack in the U.S. and found that the majority of communications contained information sharing content focused on the suspect and law enforcement activity. We also examined ethical considerations of the Twitter communications and found four main categories of behaviors that could potentially lead to more violence or harm to others including disseminating misinformation, promoting vigilante justice, conducting virtual attacks on fellow participants, and sharing real-time information on law enforcement locations. Data for four other U.S. 2009--2010 attacks have been collected and a more in depth analysis is in progress.