Fighting an Infodemic: Managing Virtual Communities during Times of Disaster

Abstract

Natural disasters pose a significant societal challenge and impact our society at large. People now extensively use social media to create or appropriate existing virtual communities during a disaster. Virtual communities can provide useful information and help victims cope with disaster impacts. However, these self-same virtual communities can worsen a disaster victim’s situation because they can be used to spread falsehoods and irrelevant information, leading to an infodemic (i.e., an overabundance of accurate and inaccurate information). Furthermore, existing practices or policies for managing the community and disseminating information can easily become obsolete during a disaster. This thesis develops a better understating of how virtual communities can be managed to generate and disseminate trusted information when and where it is needed during disasters. Two natural disasters, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and, The Great Texas Freeze Out 2021, were studied to better understand this subject. Using an interpretive case study approach, digital trace data from a Reddit disaster community were collected and analysed. The research findings are presented as three inter-linked papers. The first paper explores how to foster a sense of community that can help generate trusted information; the second paper explores how to disseminate trusted hyperlocal information, and the third paper explores how and why diversity hinders the spread of trusted information. Collectively, this thesis contributes to a relevant yet relatively underexplored area of research in Information Systems (IS). The thesis makes suggestions for how virtual community leaders, emergency authorities, and system designers can use a virtual community during a disaster.