Information Communication Technology for Crisis Management and Shared Situational Awareness: Social Media Public Health Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This comprehensive study analyzes the role of social media, specifically Facebook, in crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducted through a longitudinal netnography approach, the research scrutinizes the communication strategies of Australian public health agencies from 2019 to 2020 and their impact on shared situational awareness (SSA). Drawing on the Seppänen et al. (2013) model for crisis communication, the study looks at three key aspects - link content (information), link type (communication), and link quality (trust) - and evaluates how they influence SSA during a crisis. The application of Chaos Theory further enhances the research's depth by identifying patterns and transformations in Facebook communications before and after the COVID-19 disruption. The study reveals that the pandemic significantly disrupted typical health communication strategies, leading to new emergent patterns, and it also underscores the critical role of secondary communication and emotional factors in the public's decision to share crisis information. Moreover, it identifies issues such as misinformation and inconsistency in messaging as significant obstacles to the public's trust in official health communications, ultimately impeding the creation of adequate SSA. The research emphasizes the need to develop consistent, clear, and reliable messaging strategies for effective crisis communication. The findings expand existing knowledge on social media utilization in crisis communication, offering valuable insights to enhance public health agencies' communication strategies, thereby aiding in the creation of trusted SSA. Unlike prior studies focusing on crisis response teams, this research concentrates on shared situational awareness among the general public, providing practical recommendations to improve social media crisis communication for more effective response and management in a health crisis

Extreme events management using multimedia social networks

Although various researches have demonstrated that Social Networks offer a great opportunity to detect and manage emergencies and disasters in real life applications, in this paper we will show how the use of Multimedia Big Data extracted from modern On-Line Social Nets may enhance both the real time detection and the alerts diffusion in a well defined geographic area. In particular, we propose a Multimedia Big Data system that use both an incremental clustering event detection approach enriched with the analysis of multimedia content and a bio-inspired influence analysis technique, to support alert spread over a social network. Experiments are carried out on a real case study