It was a fun weekend here in Lethbridge, largely thanks to several grass fires being spread by gale force winds.

One of the things that is bugging me incessantly in the wake of this fire is the scapegoating of “social media” for disseminating misinformation. I’m going to pick on Mike McCready’s article The Double Edged Sword of Social Media in particular here. He quotes fire chief Brian Cornforth as saying:

rumours ran rampant on sites such as Twitter about different fire locations and areas that were thought to be evacuated

Conflicting reports of evacuations seem to be at the heart of this whole controversy. My family and I did decide to vacate the neighbourhood, but not because of any reports we read on Twitter; On the contrary, everything I read on Twitter was encouraging us to stay put. It was neighbours, in person, knocking on each others’ doors and spreading word that the police were asking us to leave that prompted us to do so.

I have seen several comments on Twitter and heard first-hand from others that police encouraged them to evacuate. For the city and emergency services to insist that no evacuations were ordered seems a matter of semantics to me. More to the point, though, “social media” may have been the primary amplifier of this information, but it’s irresponsible scapegoating to blame social media for propagating rumours.

McCready suggests in his article that “To avoid the rumors that Cornforth indicated in the Herald article, it would have been smart to have an official representative of the city of [sic] fire department engaging in the conversation to correct rumors and provide information.” That’s all well and good, but when push comes to shove, I don’t care about the “official” word on Twitter, or even in traditional news media; If somebody is physically knocking on my door and telling me that we need to go because of that fire over the hill, I’m going to hit the road.

The fire chief went on to say:

We really count on the media to message the right information and keeping it accurate because there are a lot of things that get added out with the social media that are not necessarily factual.

The City of Lethbridge provided this update on Twitter at 9:01PM:

Reception Centre made ready ‘just in case’ for west Lethbridge residents (Soccer Centre) is now being closed as fire is contained

The local media who are being counted on to “message the right information and [keep] it accurate” were reporting two hours later that the reception centre at the Soccer Centre was still open. That’s right, folks, somehow Twitter was right and mainstream media was wrong. Misinformation wasn’t limited to just Twitter, but “social media” takes the blame.

My point in all of this is that communicating with other people is a double edged sword. Any time we interact with others there is going to be a risk of miscommunication or misinformation. I would suggest that miscommunication was at the root of this situation, and these newfangled social media web sites make a convenient centre of blame because they spread information much more quickly than traditional mediums with which officials are accustomed, and they are decentralized in a way where no individual ends up shouldering any blame.

I don’t mean to suggest that the premise of Mike McCready’s article is wrong. In fact, I would agree that the city and fire department would have been well served by providing information through engagement rather than using Twitter solely as a broadcast medium. The biggest problem as I see it, though, wasn’t a result of Twitter misinformation, but rather with inconsistencies between the officially released statements and what residents were being told in person; Such communication issues go well beyond the realm of social media.