The rise of fake news and misinformation in the digital age poses serious risks for individuals and society, particularly during crises like the Israel-Hamas war, the Russian-Ukraine war, or the COVID-19 pandemic. Misinformation serves as a tool to manipulate public opinion and create discord. Vulnerability to manipulation increases in online spaces during crises, where authoritative information is scarce. Emergency management, public health, political and public administration, as well as media professionals and citizens express concern and seek solutions to enhance information quality during such critical times. This article highlights user-centred approaches to countering fake news and misinformation, tracing their historical evolution from ancient Greece to the present, focussing on their relevance during the COVID-19 crisis and in contemporary information warfare. It describes the vulnerability of audiences to misinformation and outlines prevailing trends in user-centred countermeasures. This article also introduces recent research on the effectiveness of media literacy interventions on truth discernment, a cross-cultural comparison of the perception of negative consequences and the injunctive norm, a comparison of video and text to promote lateral reading in adolescents, content-specific indicators on Twitter from a user perspective, a learning system for detecting misinformation as well as ethical and security considerations in automated detection.

The work of Emergency Management (EM) agencies requires timely collection of relevant data to inform decision-making for operations and public communication before, during, and after a disaster. However, the limited human resources available to deploy for field data collection is a persistent problem for EM agencies. Thus, over the last decade, many of these agencies have started leveraging social media as a supplemental data source and a new venue to engage with the public. Such uses present both opportunities and challenges. While prior research has analyzed the potential benefits and attitudes of practitioners and the public when leveraging social media during disasters, a gap exists in the critical analysis of the actual practices and uses of social media among EM agencies, across both geographical regions and phases of the EM lifecycle - typically mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method analysis to update and fill this gap on how EM practitioners in the U.S. and Europe use social media, building on a survey study of about 150 professionals and a follow-up interview study with 11 participants. The results indicate that using social media is no longer a non-traditional practice in operational and informational processes for the decision-making of EM agencies working at both the local level (e.g., county or town) and non-local level (e.g., state/province, federal/national) for emergency management. Especially, the practitioners affiliated with agencies working at the local level have a very high perceived value of social media for situational awareness (e.g., analyzing disaster extent and impact) and public communication (e.g., disseminating timely information and correcting errors in crisis coverage). Further, practitioners now engage with the public during the preparedness phase to mobilize them during the response phase. We present a model to understand the current practices of communication between agencies and the public, as well as among practitioners while leveraging social media. We also discuss novel challenges, including public fragmentation caused by the increasing use of multiple social media platforms, information integrity, and social listening expectations. We conclude with the policy, technological, and socio-technical needs to design future social media analytics systems to support the work of EM agencies in such communication.

Data annotation interfaces predominantly leverage ground truth labels to guide annotators toward accurate responses. With the growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in domain-specific professional tasks, it has become increasingly important to help beginning annotators identify how their early-stage knowledge can lead to inaccurate answers, which in turn, helps to ensure quality annotations at scale. To investigate this issue, we conducted a formative study involving eight individuals from the field of disaster management, each possessing varying levels of expertise. The goal was to understand the prevalent factors contributing to disagreements among annotators when classifying Twitter messages related to disasters and to analyze their respective responses. Our analysis identified two primary causes of disagreement between expert and beginner annotators: 1) a lack of contextual knowledge or uncertainty about the situation, and 2) the absence of visual or supplementary cues. Based on these findings, we designed a Context interface, which generates aids that help beginners identify potential mistakes and provide the hidden context of the presented tweet. The summative study compares Context design with two widely used designs in data annotation UI, Highlight and Reasoning-based interfaces. We found significant differences between these designs in terms of attitudinal and behavioral data. We conclude with implications for designing future interfaces aiming at closing the knowledge gap among annotators.

This paper introduces the Designing for Extended Latency (DELAY) Framework meant to inspire new systems that support social interaction in high-latency settings such as interplanetary communication, intermittent internet access, and time-zone incompatibilities. The framework includes six dimensions: Goal, Communication Genre, Sequencing, Cardinality, Mutability, and Responsiveness. We describe the iterative design process used to create the Framework, as well as three novel prototypes designed to increase social connectedness and social presence in high-latency situations: 1) the InSync app that allows partners to perform activities simultaneously even though they only see proof of their synchronicity later; 2) the After the Beep system that lets users leave IoT messages that are triggered by the recipients; and 3) the Surrogate platform where players play group battle games against "surrogate" artificial intelligence avatars that mimic unavailable individuals. Data from two design workshops validates the usefulness of the framework for generating new solutions to high-latency scenarios.

People often create social media accounts and pages named after crisis events. We call such accounts and pages Crisis Named Resources (CNRs). CNRs share information about crisis events and are followed by many. Yet, they also appear suddenly (at crisis onset) and in most cases, the owners are unknown. Thus, it can be challenging for audiences in particular to know whether to trust (or not trust) these CNRs and the information they provide. In this study, we conducted surveys and interviews with members of the public and experts in crisis informatics, emergency response, and communication studies to evaluate the trustworthiness of CNRs named after the 2017 Hurricane Irma. Findings showed that participants evaluated trustworthiness based on their perceptions of a CNR's content, information source, profile, and owner. Findings also show that if people perceive that a CNR owner has prior experience in crisis response, can help the public to respond to the event, understands the situation, has the best interests of affected individuals in mind, or will correct misinformation, they tend to trust that CNR. Participant demographics and expertise showed no effect on perceptions of trustworthiness.

Social media is gaining more and more importance in crisis management: “Social media continue to evolve, and so does their use in emergency and crisis events” (Reuter, Hughes, & Kaufhold, 2018). Re...

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the use of social media in emergency and crisis events has greatly increased and many studies have concentrated on the use of ICT and social media before, during, or after these events. The field of research that these studies fall under is called crisis informatics. In this article, we evaluate and analyze crisis informatics research by looking at case studies of social media use in emergencies, outlining the types of research found in crisis informatics, and expounding upon the forms of interaction that have been researched. Finally, we summarize the achievements from a human–computer interaction perspective and outline trends and challenges for future research.

Using the 2014 Carlton Complex Wildfire as a case study, we examine who contributes official information online during a crisis event, and the timeliness and relevance of the information provided. We identify and describe the communication behaviors of four types of official information sources (Event Based Resources, Local Responders, Local News Media, and Cooperating Agencies), and collect message data from each source's website, public Facebook page, and/or Twitter account. The data show that the Local News Media provided the highest quantity of relevant information and the timeliest information. Event Based Resources shared the highest percentage of relevant information, however, it was often unclear who managed these resources and the credibility of the information. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions for how providers of official crisis information might better manage their online communications and ways that the public can find more timely and relevant online crisis information from official sources.

Emergency responders increasingly use social media as a means to monitor public information, gather information that could be used in response efforts, and communicate important information during emergency events. However, the adoption of social media into emergency management processes poses socio-technical challenges such as issues of credibility and trust, lack of organizational support, poor tools, and a shortage of resources and training. This study designs, implements, and evaluates an application that supports the work practice of emergency public information officers and their need to gather, monitor, sort, and report social media activity. Based on prior work that examines how social media and the forms of public participation enabled by it are changing public information practice, we iteratively design and evaluate application prototypes using a human-centered process--moving from low-fidelity paper prototypes to a high-fidelity digital prototype that is ready for field use.

Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on the online communications from all the coastal fire and police departments within a 100 mile radius of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall. Across four types of online communication media, we collected data from 840 fire and police departments. Findings indicate that few departments used these online channels in their Sandy response efforts, and that communications differed between fire and police departments and across media type. However, among the highly engaged departments, there is evidence that they bend and adapt policies about what constitutes appropriate public communication in the face of emergency demands; therefore, we propose that flexibility is important in considering future emergency online communication policy. We conclude with design recommendations for making online communication media more "listenable" for both emergency managers and members of the public.

We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were "on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.

This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.