Disaster responseSeparating factual from fake messages during a crisis
How well can you tell facts from fake on social media? How about in a crisis? DHS S&T, together with Canadian partners, concluded the fifth Canada-U.S. Enhanced Resiliency Experiment (CAUSE V) event last year, running drills involving the hypothetical eruption of Mt. Baker, an active volcano in the Pacific Northwest. As part of the simulation, a group of digital disaster services volunteers practiced separating fact from fiction on the web, with the mission of keeping responders informed during the event.
How well can you tell facts from fake on social media? How about in a crisis?
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) concluded the fifth Canada-U.S. Enhanced Resiliency Experiment (CAUSE V) event last year, in partnership with Defense Research and Development Canada’s Center for Security Science (DRDC CSS), running drills with local response communities involving the hypothetical eruption of Mt. Baker, an active volcano in the Pacific Northwest said to be long overdue for an eruption. As part of the simulation, a group of digital disaster services volunteers from Whatcom County, Washington and the Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada practiced separating fact from fiction on the web, with the mission of keeping responders informed during the event.
“We had positive results experimenting with social media in CAUSE IV, so the volcanic eruption scenario was a good fit for the added twist of identifying false or misleading information,” said Denis Gusty, the Program Manager for CAUSE series at S&T FRG, “The local stakeholders were on board with the idea, so we ran with it.”
S&T saysthat Alisha King, an emergency manager with the State of Washington, coordinated and taught hands-on training sessions for the volunteers in social media analysis, including open-source intelligence gathering and identification of misinformation, which were sponsored by the S&T First Responders Group. Together she and Eli King, an emergency manager at the University of Washington and fellow Team Lead, identified the long-term benefits of a more formalized virtual operations group. Whatcom County volunteers then joined forces with professional emergency managers and public information officers to form the Cascadia Virtual Operation Support Team (VOST).
“You can easily turn to recent events—Hurricane Harvey, for example—to see how the public turned to social media for help,” said Gusty, reinforcing the need for a VOST, “More and more people today are turning to social media for news.”
Though many of the Cascadia VOST had limited social media experience prior to this S&T-supported training, they became quickly adept at distinguishing relevant pieces of information amid a squall of tweets, news releases and other items that needed vetting before they could be considered actionable. Their skills were put to the test in this fifth S&T CAUSE/DRDC CSS experiment, but if experience is the best teacher, the VOST members became experts soon after.
