Online Hurricane 'Chatter' Drowns Out Safety Messaging, Says Professor In Hoboken

HOBOKEN, NJ — As hurricanes bore down on North Carolina and Florida recently, hoaxes and misinformation distracted people from factual information and warnings, officials have said. Now, one professor in New Jersey says that even fact-based online "chatter" and debate has distracted people from important safety messages.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency had to post a fact-sheet debunking various rumors earlier this month, as deadly hurricanes drenched Southern states. One North Carolina deputy firefighter had to write on Facebook this past weekend, "From ... the ones who have been involved in rescuing and recovering our people, nobody is 'hiding numbers.' "

On Monday, at professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, a university in Hoboken, N.J., said that even seemingly innocent debate and "chatter" has pulled people away from information they needed to know.

"New research from the Stevens Institute of Technology shows, during four recent major hurricanes, important public safety messaging was drowned out by more trivial social content," the university said in a release this week, "including people tweeting about pets, sharing human-interest stories, or bickering about politics."

Dr. Jose Ramirez-Marquez of the Stevens School of Systems and Enterprises said that the level of chatter has been a problem for officials trying to communicate with people impacted by the disasters.

He cited his study of social media posts during four hurricanes in the last several years.

“It’s like being at a crowded party," Ramirez-Marquez said. "If everyone’s arguing loudly about politics, it’s hard to make yourself heard over the noise."

The findings, published this week in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, showed that in many cases, the topics that generated the most intense online interest were "completely unrelated" to safety messaging or rescue work, the university said.

Analyzed Twitter/X

Working with Stevens PhD candidate Yefang Liang, Ramirez-Marquez analyzed messages posted on X during each of four hurricanes—Harvey, Imelda, Laura, and Florence—and identified the clusters of tweets that attracted the most attention and engagement before, during, and after the storms, the university said.

During Hurricane Florence, more than half of high-engagement topics involved either animal-related chatter or political arguments, while just 19 out of the top 50 topics involved rescue or public safety messages, the studies showed. And during Hurricane Imelda in 2017, debates about climate change accounted for almost 25 percent of high-engagement topics, drowning out higher-stakes safety messages.

“This really is zero-sum: if conversations about animals or politics are taking up all the oxygen, it’s that much harder for other, potentially more important messages to break through,” Dr. Ramirez-Marquez said.

Social Media Networks Need To 'Rebuild Trust'

The team suggested that, according to the release, "Descriptive messaging about storms tends to outperform safety messages, for instance—so combining the two, and weaving public safety notifications or warnings into more descriptive social-media posts, might help to boost the reach of such messages ... The reality, though, is that using social media to support safety and recovery efforts in the wake of natural disasters will remain challenging, because many users enjoy engaging with content that doesn’t serve a public safety function.

"To overcome that, social networks themselves would likely need to step in. Actively amplifying official disaster-related messaging for users in affected communities, for instance, might help ensure that such people get the information they need while still allowing users in other areas to chat freely about unrelated topics."

Ramirez-Marquez noted that while his study looked at "harmless" chatter, people have deliberately hijacked or distorted online conversations.

“As we’ve seen in recent weeks, with the misinformation surrounding natural disasters in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, social networks remain highly vulnerable to misinformation,” Ramirez-Marquez said.

To remedy that, social networks could potentially work to create mechanisms that help users determine who to trust online, or that make it easier to filter out distracting or false information during disasters, he said.

“The key here is that the networks themselves will need to take the lead on rebuilding trust online,” Ramirez-Marquez said “This isn’t a problem that government officials can solve on their own.”

Stevens Institute of Technology was founded in 1870. The university’s three schools have nearly 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Find out more here.