The Role of Information and Social Networks - The theme of the report is the tension between the potential benefits to humanitarian efforts from harnessing new communication technologies and the risks they pose to relief efforts and media coverage. The report examines how authorities and humanitarian aid organizations can best balance the opportunities and challenges of exploiting different technologies at key stages on the timeline of crisis. These key stages include: early warning and preparedness, immediate humanitarian relief, and reconstruction and long-term development.
The report begins by citing the example of the 2009 political protests in Iran. On June 13th 2009, thousands of Iranians protested against what they felt was a flawed election. The Iranian regime in power attempted to suffocate any opposing information by restricting internet access and by not allowing journalists to cover the protests. Texting, Twitter and Facebook became vital in keeping the protests organized and spreading the happenings to foreign media. In fact the US Government actually had twitter reschedule a network upgrade. that would've shut the site down for a few hours. There were little checks and balances to the information coming out of Iran and both both hoaxers and Iranian government took advantage of that by posting false information. The event was dubbed "Twitter in Tehran" and it demonstrated both the opportunities and challenges of having these communication technologies readily available. Unfortunately false information did spread and receive attention but just as importantly true information was allowed to do the same and it created global awareness to the events.
Recently there is a trend that proves Humanitarian crisis is on the rise. Human attacks such as terrorism and natural disasters caused from climate change are the main culprits. The impact of these crisis is most felt on the least developed countries. These countries also have the weakest communication infrastructure and this poses significant problems to governments and aid agencies looking to help. During a crisis there must be a an early warning response and it needs to be one-way communication that is quick and accurate. During the warning response and beyond information flows must be two-way to be effective. With cell phones and Twitter/Facebook, information from the external world to the affected and from affected to agencies that want to help is readily available and must be utilized. For this information to help helpful it must be accurate and trusted, thus authentication is a key challenge. To improve two-way accuracy developed and underdeveloped countries must be educated on the proper usage of social networks.
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