Emergency alertsDisinformation campaigns damage credibility of social media emergency alerts

Disinformation campaigns, which populate sections of social media platforms such as Twitter, are making real emergency data and notifications harder to absorb, a cybersecurity analyst argues.

Daniel Lohrmann, the Chief Security Officer & Strategist for Security Mentor, writes in Government Technology that disinformation campaigns could become a growing trend and that their rapid advance may present problems during future emergencies.

Lohrmann first noted that the use of social media platforms as an emergency alert has skyrocketed over the years, leading to helpful information regarding car accidents, police shootings, fires outbreaks, and disease alerts, amongst many more.

“I applaud these social media efforts,” he writes, “and this emergency management communications trend has been a very good thing up to this point. But dark clouds are on the horizon. And soon, maybe you’ll need to hold-off on that retweet.”

The reason, he notes, are disturbing reports, such as this one from the New York Times, which reveals the extent to which disinformation efforts could go. The report is about an office in Russia which perpetuates hoaxes and seeks to steer social media discourse for either private or state benefit.

He cited the spreading of emergency-related hoaxes, including those which involve conspiracy-related topics, which damaged the credibility of sites that provide useful information in those circumstances.

On Dec. 13, [wrote the NYT] two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. …On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta.

Lohrmann notes that the Ebola tweets were known to have reached roughly sixty million people in the three days prior to official announcements regarding the outbreak, revealing the scope and power of influence that disinformation organizations can wield.

Disinformation can lead to misdirection, and that, he notes, is where people can have their lives really affected.

“There are many ways for false information to spread online that can be used by bad guys with Twitter and other sites,” Lohrmann writes. “While I won’t list all those ways in this blog, I will say that changing a few letters in a name, using shortened URLs or hyperlinking to bad information while using the label from a respected name are just a few methods used to misdirect people. The very features that make social media so popular (such as easy retweets) are the same methods that can be used to trick others to act by the bad guys.”

While the potential danger of disinformation in an emergency setting is being assessed, the best solution, Lohrmann says, is to continue to vet data and double-check sources.

“Will misinformation on Twitter and Facebook hoaxes or other social media fraud undermine the benefits offered by these excellent infrastructure tools?” he asks. “Only time will tell. For now, it all comes back to vetted sources, and Internet reputations and reliable, verifiable information. Emergency management personnel need to consistently go the extra mile to ensure that subscribers to their social media alerts understand and follow appropriate procedures. Nevertheless, in an emergency situation with only seconds to spare, it always comes down to this very personal question: Can I trust that tweet? Really?”