Emergency Social Messaging Gets Upgrade In Wake of Floods
Disinformation is a problem at the best of times, but it is both particularly rampant and deadly during emergencies. People often use social media to coordinate during emergency situations, but this has increasingly come into conflict with the tendency of legacy platforms to downrank content that is useful in emergencies while amplifying sensational information that is deceptive or false.
ATProto offers potential improvements. First, every piece of content is authenticated (“AT” stands for “Authenticated Transfer”). This offers the possibility of distinguishing official or messages and validated claims. Second, the ATProto’s labelling system ensures that official emergency management sources, relevant journalism, and citizen monitoring can be identified as trustworthy, even if people are unfamiliar with the names of the agencies and entities responsible for emergencies. Third, unrelated feeds and social apps can decide to make emergency messages more prominent (in fact, emergency messaging could be supported at the protocol level). And finally, because feeds can be manually curated, it is possible for trustworthy sources to create feeds to relay credible information being shared by people on the ground. Together, these components allow us to build a more reliable information environment during crises.
Our headline refers to a world in which these capabilities were not fully put to work during a tragic flooding event. As a result, ministries, emergency management agencies, technologists, and community-based organizations came together to establish better practices and capabilities.