Twitter served as a vital tool in times of crisis. Before Elon Musk purchased the platform in the fall of last year, before it became inundated with scam advertisements and fake accounts, and engineers were tasked with increasing the visibility of the owner’s tweets, Twitter played an instrumental role in saving lives during natural disasters and other emergencies. Emergency-management officials utilized the platform to disseminate timely information to the public, including when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian in 2022 or take shelter during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month. This allowed members of the public to transmit real-time data as well. Beyond simply providing a valuable communications service, Twitter transformed emergency management functions.
The present state of Twitter under Musk alarms many people in this field. The platform has been downgraded in several ways: service has become glitchier, efforts to contain misleading information are patchier, and the person at the top seems dismissive of outside input. However, the platform has entrenched itself deeply in the disaster-response world, making it difficult to replace. The deteriorating situation raises important questions regarding platforms’ obligations to society, which many tech executives are loath to consider.
From the outset, Twitter executives wanted users to depend on their service in moments of crisis. The company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, revealed in a 60 Minutes interview a decade ago that he drew inspiration for Twitter partly from listening to a police scanner during his childhood. He suggested in a subsequent interview that he first grasped the platform’s power after experiencing an earthquake in the Bay Area: “I was in the office on a Saturday, and my phone buzzed, and it was a tweet, and it said simply, ‘Earthquake.'” By 2015, the US Geological Survey used Twitter to better monitor earthquakes and people’s reactions to them in areas where the agency lacked adequate sensors.
Perhaps the US Geological Survey and other agencies were naive to rely so heavily on a private company’s willingness to continue providing a free communications service. Nonetheless, Twitter relished its importance in times of crisis, which undoubtedly contributed to the platform’s overall popularity. The company provided emergency-response agencies with guidance and best practices. “Crisis and emergency response” is one of Twitter’s five stated areas of focus, according to its website.
Successful relief efforts depend on deploying the people, processes, and technology needed to deliver information and resources quickly. Twitter gained a foothold in the disaster market because it was a technology without equality. In a crisis, time is the most precious commodity; in 1906, writer Alfred Henry Lewis remarked that “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” That sentiment might ring familiar to residents of hurricane-prone areas: “The first 72 are on you” is a well-known slogan reminding citizens to prepare enough home provisions to last at least that many hours after a storm passes.
Regrettably, Twitter is becoming less useful for monitoring chatter about developing events. On February 2, Twitter announced that it would discontinue free access for researchers to its application programming interface (API). This mechanism permits individuals outside the company to gather and analyze large volumes of data from the social media platform. Relief workers frequently used API access to determine where supplies and other resources were most needed.
Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In a vast geographical area, API data can help identify who is saying what, who is trapped where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. There were complaints about the ramifications of abandoning free API access during that crisis, prompting Twitter to postpone the restriction. Nonetheless, its long-term intentions remain uncertain, and some public-spirited applications of the API by
