๐ WEEK 12 POST: Crowdsourcing Is Just Group Project Energy But For Disasters Apparently
So week twelve's lecture covered crowdsourcing in times of crisis, and it completely changed how I think about those "share this post" moments during disasters.
First off, crowdsourcing is not a new idea. People have been pooling collective brainpower for centuries, the lecture mentioned the 1714 Longitude Prize, where the British government basically crowdsourced a way to calculate longitude at sea, and the Oxford English Dictionary, which relied on around 800 volunteer readers to help catalogue words back in 1884. So "ask the internet" energy has genuinely old roots.
The modern version is obviously powered by social media. A major review of research from 2008 to 2023 found that social media and crowdsourcing tools are increasingly used to support disaster risk management, with most existing research focusing on disaster preparedness and response activities (Nielsen, 2024).
One big example that came up was Ushahidi, a platform that combines SMS, social media, and web updates into a single crowdsourced map of what's happening during a crisis. It was set up just two hours after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and generated over 2,500 incident reports within two weeks, helping relief organisations share information quickly. Pretty wild that a volunteer-built tool could move that fast.
But it's not all smooth sailing, verification is a massive issue. When everyone with a phone is a potential reporter, how do you separate real, urgent information from rumours or outright misinformation? During the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, fact-checkers found a wave of irrelevant or fake photos and videos circulating online, including a falsely captioned video claiming a nuclear plant had exploded (Annie Lab, 2024). Even worse, Turkey's government briefly blocked access to Twitter during the rescue effort, citing the spread of disinformation, while also arresting dozens of people for "provocative" posts about the disaster response, which is a genuinely scary example of governments using "misinformation" as a reason to cut off the exact platform people were using to find trapped loved ones.
This connects to the bigger tension the lecture raised: traditional emergency services rely on linear, authorised information flows, but disaster footage and crowdsourced reports now circulate globally before official responders even arrive. So how do you integrate something as fast and messy as social media into systems built for control and verification?
Big takeaway: crowdsourcing during crises is incredibly powerful for visibility, witnessing, and rapid response, but it also raises real questions about trust, verification, and who gets to control the narrative when it matters most.
Anyway, going to go appreciate the fact that my biggest crisis today is deciding what to have for dinner, bye.
References
Annie Lab. (2024). An array of misinformation about earthquakes in Turkey. https://annielab.org/2023/03/24/analysis-an-array-of-misinformation-about-earthquakes-in-turkey/
Nielsen, J. (2024). Social media and crowdsourcing in disaster risk management: Trends, gaps, and insights from the current state of research. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rhc3.12297













