Abstract
Mobilising helpers in the event of a flood or letting friends know that you are okay in the event of a terrorist attack – more and more people are using social media to inform themselves or to coordinate in emergency, crisis or disaster situations. In addition, authorities use social media to warn the public, coordinate affected persons or helpers or enrich their situation assessment. However, there is a lack of comprehensive and representative empirical studies on the role of social media for public safety and security, especially those with a European focus.
This thesis contributes to this research gap by presenting empirical findings as well as strategies, concepts and technologies inspired by them. Based on the state of research in crisis informatics and from the perspective of public administration and political sciences, this dissertation presents qualitative and quantitative studies on the attitudes of emergency services and citizens in Europe towards social media in emergencies. Across the individual sub-studies, almost 10,000 people are surveyed including representative studies in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Italy.
The work empirically shows that social media is increasingly important for emergency services; that private use of social media is a driving force in shaping opinions for organisational use; and that citizens have high expectations towards authorities. The work also shows that the spread of unreliable information is perceived as risk, most pronounced among respondents in Germany. Depending on the risk culture the state (Germany) or the individual (Netherlands) is seen as primarily responsible for coping with the situation. Although automation can help manage large amounts of data from social media, control and traceability are perceived as important, both in terms of tailorable quality assessment, aggregation and filtering for situational awareness and to support digital volunteers to coordinate across social media.
