Hashtag Standards for Emergencies

This 18-page "Think Brief", published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), discusses the emerging use of social media, particularly Twitter, as part of emergency responses. It outlines the value of such social media, and in particular how twitter can be used effectively as a real time information gathering and dissemination tool. Due to the high volume of information, the brief proposes that using standardised and effective "hashtags" associated with Twitter can help with directing and analysing the information being generated.

The brief provides an overview of Twitter and how it works generally. As stated in the document, "Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to send 140-character messages (tweets) to fellow users (followers) who subscribe to updates. All messages are posted to a public, searchable timeline unless the user opts out (estimated at 10%)." Twitter also uses thematic or keyword classifiers called hashtags. In terms of emergency responses these tags "allow researchers, emergency responders and affected community members to easily identify Twitter conversations related to a given topic."

The brief discusses how Twitter can be an important tool during an emergency as it helps to generate information for example, about affected areas. Individual citizens are able to generate messages about what they are seeing and experiencing. For example, during Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in November 2013, within the first 48 hours after the typhoon's landfall, nearly 230,000 tweets were published internationally. From those tweets, over 600 written messages and 180 images were identified containing actionable information for emergency response planning. Given the high volume of messages, the brief explains that there are two ways to ensure there is more actionable information than random chatter. The first is to improve the algorithms and technology around analysis. The second is to help people using twitter to craft better messages, especially through the use of hashtags.

The brief proposes strategies for using twitter during disasters and developing a hashtag system for large-scale emergency monitoring. Firstly, encouraging the public to enable GPS while tweeting provides valuable information related to locating where there are problems. Secondly, it is recommended that agencies decide on and promote certain hashtags for use during the emergency, ensuring that these are widely publicised to the public through such materials as infographics. Emergency response agencies should also "encourage the standardisation of three types of hashtags during a crisis: a disaster name hashtag, a public reporting hashtag, and an emergency response hashtag. Each hashtag is intended to fulfil a specific role, including ensuring the continuity of information; public tracking of needs, people and supplies; and providing a platform to facilitate direct assistance."

The brief discusses how the standardisation approach has been integrated into the Ebola outbreak response in West Africa in 2014. This includes the use of #EbolaLR in Liberia, #EbolaSL in Sierra Leone, and #EbolaGN in Guinea in order to identify the country being tweeted about. #EbolaResponse (to inform the world about what is being done)and #EbolaNeed (to inform the world about what is needed) are also examples of public reporting hashtag standards.