GNGTS 2013 Sessione 2.3

Transcription

1 INGVterremoti: the communication is a risk, the silence is a fault A. Amato, L. Arcoraci, E. Casarotti, V. Lauciani, C. Meletti, C. Nostro, A. Piersanti, M. Pignone, L. Postpischl Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Roma, Italy Introduction. In the last few years, the need for an improved scientific communication has emerged strongly. In various fields of science, including biology, medical science, agronomy, food science, seismology and many others, the diffusion of clear, updated and solid information to society has become more and more important. We have seen how the spreading of uncorrect and false news about some natural or anthropic processes may be misleading for society. Controversial issues like those raised (among many others) by the Stamina case (AA.VV., 2013), the cold fusion, the chemtrails, earthquakes falsely predicted (Nostro et al., 2012), or attributed to strange processes such as HAARP, etc., have shown that without a proper and continuous scientific information people s awareness about real risks cannot increase, but rather it is deviated on other topics, often irrelevant or misleading. In the field of natural hazards, and in particular earthquakes, it is clear that without an authoritative source about their occurrence, their size, their source, their cause, people often tend to look for information on unreliable channels, with the result of increased confusion, conflicting and wrong information, and so on. This is especially critical immediately after an earthquake felt by the population, when the search for data and information is amplified by the rush and by the fear. For the reasons above, INGV decided to improve the release of earthquake information, particularly after the L Aquila event in 2009, and even more after the Po Plain earthquake in Both earthquakes raised relevant problems about the delicate issues of scientific and risk communication. Besides the traditional web pages published after relevant earthquakes, and more in general to describe seismological research and projects (on several new social channels were activated. A Facebook page was opened soon after the L Aquila earthquake to inform about aftershock activity, originally named Terremoto oggi, then changed to INGVterremoti. Between 2009 and 2010, both a Twitter account and a Youtube channel INGVterremoti were opened. In the meantime, an app for iphone was developed and opened in 2011, while in 2012 a blog named INGVterremoti was activated, during the Po Plain earthquake sequence. In this paper we describe each of these media, describing their targets, their history and statistics, the contents and the future developments. As described later, our feeling is that they had a good success (in some cases extremely good) in terms of number of people involved, followers grow rate, and degree of acceptance in the public. Since 2012, we have been working for increasing the interconnection between our different social media, sharing contents and including them in a common web page on earthquakes (terremoti.ingv.it). Twitter/INGVterremoti. The importance of twitter as a fast and widespread tool to disseminate and retrieve information on a variety of topics is well known. In the filed of natural hazard and in particular earthquakes, it emerged as an important source of information (Earle et al., 2011; Bruns et al., 2012). The INGVterremoti twitter account was activated in 2009 to release rapid information on current seismicity in Italy. The account is directly connected to the database of the seismic monitoring room at INGV. As soon as an earthquake is revised by the seismologists on shift, earthquake parameters are published on the INGV web sites (cnt.rm.ingv.it and iside.rm.ingv.it) and sent via twitter. Typical time intervals between earthquake occurrence and dispatch of the revised messages are between 5 and 20 minutes. We are aware that this is a long time for large earthquakes, when thousands or even millions of people feel the shaking in a few seconds after a quake. For this reason we are testing automatic, faster procedures. Automatic locations are 343

2 available (in 1 to 4 minutes) and sent to Dipartimento di Protezione Civile (DPC) by the INGV seismologists on shift via telephone, SMS and . However, we do not send the automatic information to the public yet, due to possible false alarms and subsequent problems for uncontrolled spread of incorrect news. At present, many newspapers and press agencies use INGVterremoti tweets to get and spread rapid and authoritative information about ongoing seismic activity. Tests are in progress since last year to define if and how to send automatic locations to the public. Fig. 1 Structure of the INGVterremoti social media platform. The numbers are approximate and updated at the end of September The number of followers of our twitter channel recently exceeded 100,000. Since the beginning of the service, the followers have been increasing continuously with a constant trend and sudden jumps associated with the main earthquakes of the last two years (in Italy and worldwide) (Fig. 2). A total of about 13,000 tweets was released up to date, one for each earthquake in Italy with magnitude equal to or greater than 2.0. The success of the INGVterremoti twitter channel is based on its simplicity, continuity, and effectiveness with respect of people s need. Each tweet contains a location that is mapped easily on every PC or mobile device. In the fall of 2012 INGVterremoti won the Italian Macchianera award as most useful twitter, nominated and voted by people of the net. The analysis of how the information was searched and spread during the 2012 Po Plain seismic sequence is presently in progress (Comunello et al., 2013). This analysis will provide a quantitative evaluation of Twitter activity, including tweet volume over time, distribution of activity across users as well as useful information to understand the specific communication patterns taking place on social media during an emergency, with regard to information spread and influence dynamics. Facebook INGVterremoti. Soon after the L Aquila earthquake in 2009, the INGV Bologna section started to post the revised earthquakes locations on the Facebook page Terremoto Oggi. It was a semi-official, experimental page fed by the INGV seismic monitoring system, that had a good success in terms of friends (more than 22,000 in 2012). Since it was based on a volunteer basis, it was not always possible to interact with people asking information, as expected by Facebook users. However, as for twitter, the request of correct information from the web was accomplished rather fast and continuously. In the last year, we decided to close the Terremoto Oggi account and start with a new one called INGVterremoti, to be consistent with the other social media of the earthquake information at INGV. Today, the Facebook page has about 12,000 friends in constant grow. We published on it several posts (up to 10 per day) mostly on earthquakes just happened, but also with updates from the blog and the youtube channel. We answer to some of the questions raised on FB, even if not yet in a continuous and timely mode. Youtube.com/INGVterremoti. The youtube channel INGVterremoti was launched in February 2010 as an experimental scientific video channel, in order to test whether this medium could work as a tool to increase people s awareness and curiosity about earthquake science and risk reduction. A similar initiative was already known to be working and successful at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since As for the USGS, our main goal was to inform people about the ongoing seismic activity in Italy and around the world, to describe the results of scientific research in seismology, and to increase the knowledge of seismic hazard (Amato et 344

3 al., 2012). The videos are organized into eight playlists: (i) earthquakes in Italy; (ii) earthquakes worldwide; (iii) the 2009 L Aquila, Italy, earthquake; (iv) ongoing seismic activity; (v) tsunami; (vi) earthquake prediction; (vii) seismic hazard; and (viii) a special playlist on May 11, 2011 (when a major earthquake was predicted to hit Rome). We also posted on the channel some videos reporting TV interviews about ongoing earthquake sequences, a few press-conferences held at INGV after major earthquakes (namely, the Po Plain events in 2012, see Anzidei et al., 2012), and some particular events (as the announcement of the Scientific culture week, etc.). To date, after about three years from the start, we have published 78 videos, thanks to the collaboration of many researchers at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), with a total number of views exceeding 1,300,000. Our videos were all produced with internal resources and no specific professional skills and equipment, except for very few videos that were produced for previous initiatives. The total number of views is over 1,361,000, with several peaks of more than 20,000/day after the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake (March 2011); before the presumed prediction of a major earthquake to hit Rome on May 11, 2011; in correspondence with the 2012 Po Plain, Emilia earthquake, and after the June 21, 2013 Lunigiana earthquake. It is interesting to note that the views on May 20, 2012, when the first M5.9 earthquake stroke, were only a few thousands, whereas on May 29 we published a specific video explaining the buried faults under the Po Plain (Fig. 2) and the views raised to 72,000 in one day. This suggests that the number of views is a good indicator of satisfaction. The 8 most popular videos on INGVterremoti have been viewed more than 50,000 times, with a maximum of over 300,000. A special mention is for our top-viewed video (more than 308,000 views) that is the English version of a scientific video realized by INGV on Tsunamis, following the 2004 Sumatra event. The audience in this case is very broad, with thousands of views from USA, Japan, and other countries. The INGVterremoti youtube channel proved to be very effective at the time of the May 11, 2011, false prediction of a devastating earthquake in Rome (Crescimbeni et al., 2012). We used the channel to explain what was going on in the weeks preceding the date, and on May 11 we performed a 24-hour release of videos from the seismic monitoring room, with updates and scientific explanations on several topics of earthquake science. Doing so, we could take advantage of the high attention of people regarding the earthquake risk, to increase awareness, at least in the people of Rome and surrounding regions (see Nostro et al., 2012, for details). As a comparison, we show in Table 1 some statistics about the INGVterremoti and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) channels, in terms of number of views and videos. Surprisingly enough, the total number of views of our channel is higher than that of the USGS, despite the number of videos of the Survey is much larger than Fig. 2 Some statistics on three INGVterremoti media in the period Top: montly distribution of views for the blog (open in May 2012). The maximum (June 2012) was relative to the sequence in the Po Plain. Average monthly number of views are several tens to hundred thousands; B) Daily number of views for yotube; note that the first peak for the main shock of May 20 is only about 8,000, whereas the May 29 peak is over 72,000; c) rate of the INGVterremoti iphone app (in the category Utilities in red, on all the apps in blue); note that there are several days in which our app is in the top position. 345

4 ours. A possible explanation is that in Italy in the past few years (particularly after the 2009 L Aquila sequence) the search for information on earthquakes is very strong, whereas in the US people s awareness of earthquakes and in general of natural hazards is higher. However, we must consider that US have not been hit by a strong damaging earthquake in the last few years. Tab. 1 A numerical comparison between INGVterremoti and USGS youtube channels (numbers are relative to September 29, Start date Videos > 50,000 Followers Most viewed INGVterremoti ,371, ,672 USGS (all) ,228, ,923 One thing we have learned is that, due to the strong variability in the number of accesses (generally after strong earthquakes), it is important to exploit these moments when the attention is high to disseminate relevant information on seismic hazard and to increase people awareness. Future trends include the improvement of technical aspects of our videos, and to develop contents more focused on risk mitigation issues. We will also try to broaden our audience and to increase contents in English language. App INGVterremoti for iphone. The INGVterremoti application for iphone has been developed starting in 2009 after the L Aquila seismic sequence. It is available in the Apple App Store since In 2012 the 2.0 version has been distributed. We are presently working on the 3.0 version for Iphone and a new version for Android. The application is based on the data available in the INGV ISIDE database ( and its primary function is to give the list and the basic information on the Italian seismicity. Starting from a cumulative list of the last events recorded by the national seismic network several parameters and a Google map for each single earthquake can be visualized. The application gives also detailed information on the seismic hazard at a national and regional scale as well as specific focus on the basics of seismic hazard assessment and related legislation. The connection with ISIDE database allows for search of the Italian catalogue of seismicity back to Finally, a specific seismological glossary is available for the user. Though developed with limited resources, the application has been remarkably successful reaching several times the absolute top ten in free applications downloads of the Italian store and cumulating a total of downloads since 2010 (Fig. 2). The INGVterremoti blog. We opened the blog soon after the Po Plain sequence, started on May 20, After a few days needed for setting up the blog ( com). The blog was opened to the public on May 29, just after the M5.8 shock stroke the western sector of the fault zone, causing several casualties and huge damages (Anzidei et al., 2012). As described in Pignone et al. (2012), during a seismic sequence it is very important for people shaken by the earthquakes to have continuous and timely information on the ongoing seismicity. In the first two months of the blog s life, we released tens of updates and in-depth scientific explanations on the earthquake sequence. Through the collaboration of Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) researchers and technicians, we published more than 80 posts about the sequence, to describe activities performed during the emergency, and the first scientific results obtained from data analyses. The response of the public was enthusiastic, at least quantitatively, reaching its maximum on June 3, 2012, when a strong aftershock (M5.1) was strongly felt in the region. We recorded more than 850,000 views on that particular day, and had more than six million contacts (6,403,843) in the first two months of activity (May 29 to July 29). We are now working to assess the degree of acceptance of the blog in a comprehensive way. At the moment we can only report our positive feeling, based on the favourable comments and increasing contacts we had in the last year, that were very encouraging. In Fig. 3 we show a snapshot of the blog, with one popular video at the time of the Po Plain earthquakes. 346

5 After the 2012 seismic sequence, we started to use the INGVterremoti blog to release information on several other sequences that affected our country and other regions of the world. Moreover, we posted many articles on scientific projects and sometimes on specific issues raised by people s questions and curiosity. The main categories today include: earthquakes in Italy; earthquakes in the world; seismic monitoring; several categories for each relevant sequence of the last year; education, and some others. To date, we are not allowing comments to our posts, only because our capacity of answering to the questions posed by the public is not so high yet. It is our will to open in the future, after a careful evaluation of pros and contraries and of the time needed. We will develop a unique channel for communicating to and with people from our social media, so that every argument can be useful for many others. Discussion and conclusion. It is well known that the distribution of proper and continuous scientific information on seismic activity and earthquake hazard is the first step to Fig. 3 Screen shot from the INGVterremoti blog, showing the static buttons (top), the video published during the Po Plain, Emilia, seismic sequence on the youtube channel (middle), the link to the recent posts (top roght), the tweets with the most recent earthquake locations (bottom right), and some other widgets with links etc. increase awareness and resilience of people. Besides the continuous activity that INGV carries out with schools and in the field, with campaigns such as those of the project Edurisk in more than ten years (AA.VV., 2012), we recently increased our efforts on the web, and in particular on social media. In the last two years, we have increased the amount and quality of the information released to the public on earthquake-related topics. We had started in 2009 after the L Aquila earthquake, when the terrible story of the process raised the problem of a proper and direct communication between scientists and society (Amato et al., 2013). We believe that it is our duty to inform constantly the public about seismological research and seismic hazard, including the most recent developments of research, ongoing seismic activity, and explanations about earthquake in Italy and worldwide. This is what we are trying to do with the activity described in the present paper. Although all the data and information produced by our Institute are and have always been public, as witnessed by publications, web sites (see for instance zonesismiche.mi.ingv.it, among many others), project deliverables, etc., we feel sometimes that this is not enough in order to share the knowledge broadly. The goal of the work on social media presented here is to increase the possibility for the public (not only generic public, but also journalists, local authorities, etc.) to access and understand the scientific contents of our research and monitoring. In addition, with the INGVterremoti social media platform we started a two-way communication with the public, even if at the moment 347

6 this is limited to a few media and to some issues. Of course, the two-way communication needs that also on the public side there is capacity of listening and will to participate to the process. After the last couple of years, our feeling is that all the INGVterremoti media had a good success (in some cases extremely good) in terms of number of people involved, followers grow rate, and degree of acceptance in the public. We have verified that during important seismic sequences all our followers increase, and when the crisis is over they remain connected with us. This is the case of the Po Plain earthquakes in 2012 (Fig. 2) when we could see that the search for information immediately after an earthquake leads people to the most popular source, that often it is not the most authoritative (Comunello et al., 2013) if the Institution in charge is not present or well known. This happened on twitter after the main shock of May 20, when our channel had only few followers in the region. However, after a few days when the second strong shock hit (May 29) INGVterremoti was the first and most popular source. Similar considerations can probably be made for the other social INGVterremoti media that release more complex information. Since 2012, we have been working for increasing the interconnection between our different social media, sharing contents and including them in a common web page on earthquakes (terremoti.ingv.it). This gives a larger resonance to the whole platform, and at the same time it will be easier for the public to follow news and updates in a clear way. We are planning to open a more direct (two-way) channel with the public (it is already open on FB and youtube), in order to be more effective in our communication strategy. Finally, a specific effort we are making is to disseminate more rapid information after an earthquake, distributing data from automatic locations and magnitudes (under some criteria and with a necessary preparation phase). A test is in progress since last July that involves INGV researchers and Civil Protection officers. References AA. VV. (2012) Sintesi dei lavori del Workshop EDURISK : 10 anni di progetti di educazione al rischio - Roma, 30 Novembre 2011, a cura di Vera Pessina e Romano Camassi, Miscellanea INGV n.13, AA.VV. (2013) Scientists raise alarm as Italian Government rules on unproven stem cell therapy Amato, A., L. Arcoraci, E. Casarotti, R. Di Stefano, the INGVterremoti team (2012). The INGVterremoti channel on YouTube. Annals of Geophysics, 55 (3), ; doi: /ag5546. Amato, A., M. Cocco, G. Cultrera, F. Galadini, L. Margheriti, W. Marzocchi, C. Nostro, D. Pantosti (2013). The impact of the L Aquila trial on the scientific community, presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Seismological Society of America, Salt Lake City, USA. Anzidei, M., A. Maramai, P. Montone (editors) (2012). The Emilia (northern Italy) seismic sequence of May-June, 2012: preliminary data and results. Special Volume, 55, No 4. Bruns, A., J. Burgess, K. Crawford and F. Shaw (2012). #qldfloods Crisis communication on Twitter in the 2011 south-east Queensland floods, Brisbane, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation; Comunello, F., E. Casarotti, V. Lauciani, L. Parisi. Social media and natural disasters: mapping information spread and influence dynamics during the Emilia 2012 earthquake, presentation at the ESA 2013, Torino (Crisis, Critique and Change). Crescimbene, M., F. La Longa, T. Lanza (2012). The science of rumors, Annals of Geophysics, 55 (3), ; doi: / ag Earle, P.S., D.C. Bowden, M. Guy (2011). Twitter earthquake detection: earthquake monitoring in a social world, Annals of Geophysics, 54 (6), ; doi: /ag Nostro, C., A. Amato, G. Cultrera, L. Margheriti, G. Selvaggi, L. Arcoraci, E. Casarotti, R. Di Stefano, S. Cerrato, the May 11 Team (2012). Turning the rumor of the May 11, 2011, earthquake prediction in Rome, Italy, into an information day on earthquake hazard, Annals of Geophysics, 55 (3), ; doi: /ag5559. Pignone M., Nostro C., Amato A., Casarotti E., Piromallo C. (2012) The INGVterremoti blog: a new communication tool to improve earthquake information during the seismic sequence in the Po Plain, Annals of Geophysics, Vol. 55, No 4, pp , doi: /ag