How social media shapes discourse


Case studies are useful in identifying some of the key ways in which social media has shaped the discourse surrounding major crisis and other incidents over the past few years.


What follows are three short case studies examining the ways in which crisis communication strategy and methods effect not just the efficiency incident management, but also the effectiveness of reputation management in the case of corporations too.


1. The Westminster Terror Attack


As already mentioned, the fundamental shiſt social media has caused its rendering obsolete or semi- obsolete many traditional channels of communication.


Alongside this there is another more potentially insidious effect, namely the huge increase in the cumulative amount of “noise” surrounding major incidents such as terror attacks. For example, in the recent 2017 Westminster terror attack in London, Twitter was awash with rumours concerning the identity of the perpetrator, dubiously asserting that he was a perpetrator already known by the authorities to be in jail.1


Although the Metropolitan Police eventually corrected this false assertion, the correction took time to filter down to the level of social media – where the assertion gained a high level of traction simply on account of being re-tweeted a large number of times.


This recent example highlights the fundamental disconnect between the raw and unfiltered nature of social media and the filtered, less immediate nature of official communication channels, as well as underscoring the need for official channels to be quick in squashing rumors before they get out of hand.


1 Fake Sleuthes: Web Gets It Wrong on London Attacker, NY Times, March 24th 2017.


Page 5 | Emergency Communication Systems in the Mobile Age


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