Franchot Campbell's List: Digital Citizenship

• Immediately following the Boston Marathon attacks, individuals near the scene posted a deluge of data to social media sites.
• data can be leveraged to provide rapid insight during natural disasters, disease outbreaks and ongoing conflicts that can assist in the public health and medical response.
• Public health authorities provided alerts to regional emergency departments approximately nine minutes after the explosions, just as ambulances left the scene² via the Massachusetts Emergency Preparedness Bureau (MA EPB) Health and Homeland Alert Network (HHAN).
• The Massachusetts Central Medical Emergency Direction (CMED) Center also began communicating to individual hospitals by radio in the minutes prior. We sought to measure the timing of social media reports in relation to those issued through these official emergency response channels.
• Social media and other mobile platforms enable individuals to post messages along with specific geographic information. These messages can help track infectious disease outbreaks,³ aid in natural disaster response⁴ and provide insight into conflicts⁵, where data collected through official reporting structures can take weeks to collect and analyze.
• Twitter streams are routinely used by high frequency trading applications to rapidly assess external factors that may affect market conditions⁶ and used in marketing to assess consumer response in real-time to advertisements.
• can be combined with geographically encoded news media reports and traditional data sources to improve surveillance.
• Our analysis was based on the set of Twitter postings with geolocation data (latitude and longitude) freely available via the Public Twitter API.⁹ To increase specificity, we narrowed the radius of the tweets to 35 miles from the Boston Marathon finish line. We observed messages containing the word stems: ‘explos*’ or ‘explod*’, just 3 minutes after the explosions (Figure 1). When adding words beginning with ‘bomb’, a picture quickly emerges of an incident warranting further exploration.

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• The final tweet, from the Twitter account of the Boston Police Department just before 9 p.m. on April 19, was sent by Deputy Superintendent John Daly. The officer who runs the official Twitter account of the Boston Police confirms that this was the first official dispatch.
• That law enforcement agencies such as the Boston Police and Massachusetts State Police took to social media to deliver information in the wake of the twin explosions on Boylston Street is nothing special.
• Virtually every police department now runs a Twitter feed for official communications
• Boston has been investing in its police department’s social media presence for years.
• The department’s Twitter account was created in 2009 at the behest of Daly and was first used to publish public safety instructions during the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
• The department’s social-media presence expanded onto Facebook (FB), YouTube (GOOG), and video-streaming site UStream. All these social media accounts are handled by the Bureau of Public Information, which provides information to local and national media outlets and handles most media relations functions as part of the Office of the Police Commissioner.
• In the early hours of Friday, April 19, the Boston Police changed its approach to the medium. Rather than simply post updates, it moved to counteract the false claims that were spreading across social networks.
• The online news ecosystem was in the midst of a misinformation disaster, with rumors gleaned from the official police scanner and from inaccurate sources on major TV networks: A missing Brown student had been identified, inaccurately, as one of the suspects, and confusion reigned over the number of suspects involved in the massive manhunt.
• the turning point came when an official called her with news that a local radio station was reporting locations of officers involved in the manhunt.
• “These guys know not to do that. They don’t give away where officers are,” says Fiandaca, in reference to local media. “But there were hundreds of reporters from all over the country here. We wanted to let other media folks who aren’t as familiar know what’s commonplace in Boston.”
• One of the most satisfying moments for the team wasn’t announcing the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but watching the effect of this tweet, sent during the early stages of the manhunt as media outlets raced to report on every detail of the massive city-wide dragnet

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• Twitter has often been touted as the "first with news". From the miniscule to the massive.
• The funnel is the journalist.
• Twitter is the funnel is turned upside down. All of those disparate ingredients are poured into the nozzle. The narrow part. And they are not filtered, not regulated, not tested. But they come out of the wide part of the funnel. They are spread across a large area. Indiscriminately.

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• The internet was so utilized during the investigation that the Boston Police Department relayed the initial information about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture via Twitter, immediately confirming his arrest.
• fastest way to get information out.
• When you have a developing news story you look to Twitter because you can get a lot of information from different sources at the same time
• Meanwhile, since the bombing, citizens spent collective hours analyzing the footage on their own, with their own suspicions, and using sites that aggregate data like reddit.com to scrutinize details. While these citizen researchers were helping, it can also create a lot of problems and a larger danger for misinformation.
• "There's a huge risk. We saw that earlier this week when we had some wrong people identified and people on the internet thought they were doing the right thing, but then you end up with somebody with their face on the New York Post and it's not the right guy and you're losing time and damaging people who are totally innocent,"
• served as a support for law enforcement agencies when searching to profile the subject.
• They were able to use the suspects' online histories and their social media accounts in order to dissect what they were looking at to get a better idea of who they were looking for.

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• When two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, a media frenzy ensued to break each and every detail. But in the rush to uncover new information, the media got it wrong ... repeatedly.
• facts were misreported, suspects were misidentified, and presumptions were made about unknown motives. The Huffington Post slipped up -- grappling, like many other outlets, with the sheer volume of information that was posted online and shared through social media within seconds.
• But cable news seemed to be the most error-prone sector, to the point that cable reporting became a story in its own right.
• The media's tendency to speculate without facts even prompted a warning from President Barack Obama late Friday night.

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