Social Media Brings New Capacities and Liabilities to Crises

Rapid-fire Tweets and smartphone photos can be a boon to emergency responders trying to see through the fog of an unfolding crisis, but they also can divert responders with misinformation and potentially create liability issues, experts said Tuesday.

Emergency responders whose information was once limited to phone calls coming into 911 can now monitor real-time posts about which streets were worst hit in a tornado and collect photos of an accident scene while they're still miles away, Charlottesville, Va., Fire Department Chief Charles Werner said at the panel discussion hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

But that information is dispersed across Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media sites and it's much more difficult to separate useful information from useless noise, he said. Former Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer, now director of policy at the Environmental Systems Research Institute, joked that a Twitter search on Hurricane Irene, which recently hit the East Coast, could include photos and Tweets from before, during and after the storm as well as information about "some other Irene."...