Social Media and Disasters

What makes one disaster interesting for social media and another less so? It is estimated that this week’s tragic flooding in Valencia, Spain resulted in circa 100 fatalities. The disaster has already been linked to climate change, so there is a human element to the tragedy. But if you scroll through social media platforms like this and based on my anecdotal review, this tragedy has not gained the interest that a technology failure would. ?This is of course a factor of the algorithm, my connections, language, geography and many other factors, but I’ve believe that there’s something more to it. So, what makes one disaster interesting for social media and another less so? Here's some reflections.

Natural vs. Technological

We expect natural disasters in our lives. Dependent on where we live in the world, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires and tropical storms are expected and planned for within our psyche. We don’t however expect technology to fail and hence a plane crash or rail collision elicits a major response on social media. Stories abound, causes are quickly offered and there is clamour for answers.

But the distinction between what we view as a natural and technological-related disaster is an incredibly fine line and often a false distinction. With climate change, the causes and contributing factors to many wildfires and flooding events gets blurred. Moreover, the distinction between a wealthy and poor country’s ability to plan, manage and respond to catastrophes is huge. The way we categorise disasters in natural or technological appears to also have a significant impact on the traction that these events gain on social media, irrespective of whether the disasters could and should have been foreseen and prevented.

The Bizarre and Abnormal

Social media thrives can often resemble a carnival freakshow and the more a disaster is bizarre, abnormal and shocking, the more it gains traction. It is incredibly unusual for superyachts to sink, submarines to implode, or even large container ships to strike bridges. The great journalistic aphorism appears to hold for disasters and their interest on social media: ‘Dog Bites a Man' not News’, 'Man Bites a Dog' is News. If the disaster contains a prominent person or a celebrity, then the unusual nature of disaster has a sense of something even more different and the story goes viral.

Organisational vs. Natural

Disasters involving technology also play to something deeper. Our expectation for near perfect levels of safety within our transportation, buildings and infrastructure mean that disasters involving technological failure elicit a huge response on social media. There is also a social expectation on every organisation, through their social licence, to ensure public safety. If a 100 people had died in a plane crash, versus a flood, social media would be illuminated with theories, explanations and significant criticism of the organisation/s. The collective response on social media to disaster involving a corporation would suggest that we hold corporations to a higher level of expectation than our governments. There is also I would argue, natural suspicion, and a different response, to any disaster on social media involving commercial interests. In the immediacy of social media, the focus is on the events and their consequences, and less focus is given to the role of government bodies in the effective regulation of risk, or the inadequate emergency planning and response which they led.

Proximity

The closer the disaster is to us, both geographically and within our everyday lives, the greater interest is has. A tornado in the U.S. Midwest only really gains traction if it involves large casualties or it suggests a failure by a government or wrongdoing by an organisation. For example, an organisation failing to evacuate it’s staff in a disaster can make a distant event relevant and fill the social media feed.

Social Expectations

Disasters within high hazard industries gain much greater traction on social media and news generally than an equivalent incident in a lower risk sector. Societies understandably hold high hazard sectors such as oil and gas, nuclear, rail and aviation to a greater standard because of the impact on public safety. This can often result in an incident on an oil platform, for example, gaining much greater interest and commentary than, for example, an incident in a food factory. The response is paradoxical to some extent because high hazard sectors are statistically safer and better regulated. I suspect this is also a factor of high profile seminal incidents such as Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl and the Boeing crashes. ?

Currency

Disasters can have currency that play into a wider narrative on social media. This can result in a story gain lots of interest and commentators make analogies with other stories. The Boeing 787 Max disasters went beyond a story of defective software that tragically led to two fatal crashes, but became a story of corporate wrongdoing and representative of something much broader about the state of once great corporations that have lost their way. To some extent, that is why I find disasters interesting. They speak to something much deeper.

Psychic Numbing

No discussion on disaster would be complete without mentioning Paul Slovac’s concept of psychic numbing. This describes that psychological response to disasters and why the more who die, the less we care.

It is based on ?Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s?work on?prospect theory whereby changes at small levels have a big impact on our response, and then as the magnitudes increase, it took more and more of a difference to be noticeable. Or put simply, as the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases. This happens even when the number of victims increases from one to two. It is called the singularity effect, whereby an individual life is very valued and losses matter greatly, but then as the numbers increase, we don’t respond proportionally to that loss. So, the numbers of casualties in a disaster will not trigger a proportionate response on social media.

?So, what do you think?

What have I missed or got wrong?

Links and references

An article of Psychic Numbing: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200630-what-makes-people-stop-caring

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