We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were "on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.

Misconceptions about disinformation leave us vulnerable to manipulation online, says Kate Starbird. E arlier this month, the White House hosted a 'Social Media Summit' that served to reframe and distract from serious, hostile manipulation of online discourse. Much ink has already been spilt on the algorithms, business models and human impulses that make the social-media ecosystem vulnerable to disinformation, the purposeful spreading of misleading content. Although the major tech companies are often insufficiently open about, or motivated to fix, the problem, they have begun to take action against what Facebook calls "coordinated inauthentic behavior". But disinformation is not as cut-and-dried as most people assume: those behind disinformation campaigns purposely entangle orchestrated action with organic activity. Audiences become willing but unwitting collaborators, helping to achieve campaigners' goals. This complicates efforts to defend online spaces. When my lab studied the online activism around #BlackLivesMatter, the conspiracy theories that crop up after crises, and the Syrian conflict, we uncovered disinformation campaigns promoting multiple, often conflicting, views. At first, I overlooked their influence, hoping to get to more-important underlying phenomena. But eventually I began to see how disinformation networks were warping online conversations and global political discourse, and I changed my research focus. Years later, the sorts of misconceptions that had led me to discount disinformation continue to hamper responses to the threat. Perhaps the most common misconception is that disinformation is simply false information. If it were, platforms could simply add 'true' and 'false' labels, a tactic that has often been suggested. But disinformation often layers true information with false-an accurate fact set in misleading context, a real photograph purposely mislabelled. The key is not to determine the truth of a specific post or tweet, but to understand how it fits into a larger disinformation campaign. Another misconception is that disinformation stems mainly from agents producing false content (paid 'trolls') and automated accounts ('bots') that promote it. But effective disinformation campaigns involve diverse participants; they might even include a majority of 'unwitting agents' who are unaware of their role, but who amplify and embellish messages that polarize communities and sow doubt about science, mainstream journalism and Western governments. This strategy goes back decades. It was laid out most explicitly by Lawrence Martin-Bittman, who defected from Czechoslovakia to the West in 1968 and became a prominent academic (L. Bittman The KGB and Soviet Disinformation; 1985). Historically, manipulating journalists was a primary strategy. Now, social-media platforms have given voice to new influencers and expanded the range of targets. We see authentic members of online communities become active contributors in disinformation campaigns, co-creating frames and narratives. One-way messages from delib...

In this paper, we argue that strategic information operations (e.g. disinformation, political propaganda, and other forms of online manipulation) are a critical concern for CSCW researchers, and that the CSCW community can provide vital insight into understanding how these operations function-by examining them as collaborative "work" within online crowds. First, we provide needed definitions and a framework for conceptualizing strategic information operations, highlighting related literatures and noting historical context. Next, we examine three case studies of online information operations using a sociotechnical lens that draws on CSCW theories and methods to account for the mutual shaping of technology, social structure, and human action. Through this lens, we contribute a more nuanced understanding of these operations (beyond "bots" and "trolls") and highlight a persistent challenge for researchers, platform designers, and policy makers-distinguishing between orchestrated, explicitly coordinated, information operations and the emergent, organic behaviors of an online crowd.

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Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal nonprofit, considering how its articulation, conduct and products of work together express its identity and purpose, which include aspirations of relating to and changing the larger ecosystem of emergency response. Through excerpts of its communications, we consider how the organization makes changes in order to sustain itself in rapid-response work supported in large part by episodic influxes of volunteers. This case enlightens discussion about technology-supported civic participation, and the means by which dedicated long-term commitment to the civic sphere is mobilized.