Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Nov 15, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
One thing that keeps me up at night right now is the possibility that Twitter’s potential death spiral will coincide with a major regional/national/global crisis. For better or worse, Twitter is a crucial disaster comms tool, and we don’t have a replacement for it. 1/
Twitter has been a vital source of information, networking, guidance, real-time updates, community mutual aid, & more during hurricanes, wildfires, wars, outbreaks, terrorist attacks, mass shootings...etc. It's not something that can be replaced by any existing platforms. 2/
If Twitter suddenly stops working or if huge swaths of the population can't access it during a crisis, the result will almost certainly be preventable suffering & death. Elon Musk needs to stop treating this like a playground, and start protecting it as vital infrastructure. 3/
This isn't just my opinion. There is an entire line of research exploring the use of Twitter for crisis- and disaster communication. For example, here's a great study about the significance of Twitter as a communications tool during Hurricane Harvey. 4/
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
As this study notes, Twitter has been identified by some researchers as the "most useful social media tool" for communicating during disasters. Other platforms play a role, but Twitter is the central hub for journalists, govt, citizens, witnesses/survivors, & first responders. 5/ Image
One of the reasons Twitter is such an important comms tool during disasters is that the nature of crises often makes it hard for traditional media to reach the public and the disaster scene. Twitter is often the first and only source of info about unfolding crises. 6/ Image
The design of Twitter is also uniquely conducive for use during crises. Hashtags, for example, become crucial navigational tools to find relevant, up-to-date information and advisories in one central place without having to lose valuable time searching multiple websites. 7/ Image
Effective use of Twitter by government agencies can also engender trust in those agencies during crises, which is critical when you need people to follow evacuation orders or other safety protocols. It helps keep people informed, engaged, and alive. 8/ Image
Twitter can also play a crucial role in the healing process after crises. It gives people a space to build community resilience, which also helps us better prepare for future disasters. These are, quite literally, life-saving implications. 9/ Image
My colleagues and I recently wrote/presented a paper on this very topic (I will share it when it's published), and one of our findings was that Twitter actually shapes the course and outcome of crises. It can literally mean the difference between life and death. 10/ Image
I truly hope Elon Musk will see that he holds people's lives in his hands, and will start acting accordingly — because if he continues playing around with Twitter like a new toy, he *will* be responsible for deaths at some point. 11/
In the meantime, I hope you'll use this opportunity to plan ahead. Make an emergency communication plan for your family, your workplace, your neighbors, etc. Don't wait until it's too late.

Here's how to get started on that:
ready.gov/plan-form

ready.gov/sites/default/…
Here’s more reading on the use of Twitter for disaster communication if you’re interested:

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More from @RVAwonk

Sep 14
I wrote about cognitive warfare and how the contrived panic over Haitian immigrants hijacked our algorithms, our brains, and our national discourse.
weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/how-the-cont…
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During the 2-hr-long presidential debate this week, abortion was the top political topic searched in 49 states. The only exception was Ohio, where immigration was the top-searched issue — a trend driven by searches for topics related to the false claims about Haitian immigrants. Image
But despite being the top search topic in 49 states, abortion wasn’t the top search topic overall. Immigration — specifically, a false story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio — displaced abortion as the top search topic overall for nearly the entire 2-hour time window.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 12
This was always the inevitable endpoint of the wildly false claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs & cats. As this person literally admits, it doesn’t matter to them if it’s factually true or not — it only matters that (to them) it *feels* like it *could* be true.


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It’s REALLY easy to get people to spread absurd lies about immigrants (or anyone else) if those people already believe terrible things about immigrants *and* are politically/ideologically motivated to persuade others to believe terrible things about immigrants.
We see this all the time; it’s one of the main reasons that fact-checking, at least on its own, so often fails — because people don’t believe lies & rumors simply based on the facts presented, but rather based on their own prior beliefs, motives, identity, emotions, and more. P
Read 8 tweets
May 28
The CEO of Google — one of the five largest tech companies in existence today — says he has no solution for the company’s AI providing wildly inaccurate information to users.

Astonishing that they didn’t address this before releasing the AI publicly.
futurism.com/the-byte/ceo-g…
We need a totally different incentive structure here. We shouldn’t celebrate companies for releasing things faster, or making the most dramatic changes to the status quo. Instead, we should reward those who prioritize rigorous safety testing & built-in guardrails.
Ultimately, the usefulness of AI tools is inherently contingent on being able to use them without producing new and bigger problems along the way. Companies that are rushing just to put things in users’ hands are not producing useful tech; they’re just trying to stay relevant.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 27
This — IU changing a rule overnight & pretending they didn’t – is such a prescient example of why my biggest fear regarding AI is that it will be used to rewrite history and produce the “evidence trail” needed to make the fake version of history look more real than the real one.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking into this potentiality and it’s actually a lot easier to accomplish than it seems, which should absolutely terrify you. Of course, it would start small, with marginal changes to obscure events & records — so by the time you notice, it’s too late.
I mean, it *is* happening. It’s not just a hypothetical anymore. The only question is whether the AI-facilitated historical revisionism we’ve seen thus far is simply the product of errors or glitches, or if it’s intentional — ie, the AI doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Read 6 tweets
Apr 25
Look, I obviously know the circumstances are different, but there is a ton of overlap between what is going on now and the various iterations of the so-called campus free speech wars that we’ve seen for years. We know how this will unfold. Here’s a sneak preview.
The stories you hear in the media will be the most extreme examples that can be found, and nearly all of them will be fundamentally misrepresented based on the biases of the person telling the story. This will fuel a cycle of escalation that few people on either side want.
Just like we’ve seen the emergence of so-called war/conflict influencers, we are once again seeing the rise of the campus speech war influencer, and once you let those people take over, they’ll steer things towards the extremes because that’s where the attention they seek is.
Read 13 tweets
Apr 16
FYI: There has been a huge surge in the number of deepfake videos — some of which are quite well done — on this platform in the past few days. These are probably among the best quality deepfakes I’ve seen at this scale; most viewers are unable to tell that the videos are fake.
Some of the deepfakes are related to the Iran-Israel conflict; others focus on domestic issues in the U.S., including multiple that sought to sow hostility between Black Americans and immigrants. These videos were explicitly pro-Trump, but it’s not clear who produced them.
Other deepfake videos I’ve seen on X in the past few days have focused on violence & civil war, with some claiming to show acts of heinous violence on camera. Still others have shown “footage” of people yelling slurs in someone’s face, or crowds of unruly people breaking things.
Read 9 tweets

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