Expectations vs. Practice in Critical Infrastructure Operator Crisis Communication: Lessons Learned From Portugal, France, Norway, and Sweden

Introduction

Effective crisis communication can be defined as “the provision of effective and efficient messages to relevant audiences during the course of a crisis process” (Freberg et al., 2013:186). Large-scale incidents, such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008 and the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, marked a watershed in the use of social media for sharing disaster information (Potts, 2014). Since then, social media use as a crisis communication channel has only been on the rise. The Reuter and Kaufhold (2018) review of 15 years of crisis informatics research demonstrated that studies of social media use cover both natural hazards (e.g., tsunamis, earthquakes) and human-induced disasters (e.g., shootings, terrorist attacks, uprisings), regardless of the scale of the crisis, and cover use by both the general public and authorities, with social media being used for both crisis communication and situation awareness. This high use has led to the development of a series of guidelines for authorities on how best to use social media as a tool for crisis communication. Previous research in this emergent area has tended to focus solely upon how these actors or the public use social media in crisis times (Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012; Imran, Castillo, Diaz, & Vieweg, 2015; Reuter & Kaufhold, 2018; Reuter, Kaufhold, Spielhofer, & Hahne, 2017; Reuter, Ludwig, Kaufhold, & Spielhofer, 2016), often overlooking the role played by other key stakeholders such as critical infrastructure (CI) operators. The European Union defines CI as “an asset, system or part thereof that are essential for the health, safety, security, economic or social well-being of people, and its disruption or destruction would likely have a significant impact upon the ability of a Member State to maintain those functions (Council Directive, 2008).” CI operators are the actors who are in charge of the critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, there have been few empirical studies exploring public expectations of information shared by CI operators during crisis situations. Hence, this paper attempts to address the following four research questions:

• RQ1: What do European citizens expect of CI operators regarding information provision during crisis situations?

• RQ2: Are there any noticeable similarities/differences between public expectations based on nationality or other demographic factors?

• RQ3: How do these declared expectations compare to the current communication efforts of CI operators?

• RQ4: How can CI operators meet these expectations?

This chapter draws on key themes that emerged from a review of the literature on public expectations of disaster-related information shared via social media. Then the methodology and the results of an online questionnaire and interview-based study of disaster-vulnerable communities in France, Norway, Portugal and Sweden are described. Afterwards, the use of social media by CI operators during disasters is discussed. Our findings show that the public have high expectations to be provided information, but expectations are less high regarding answering comments on social media. CI operators appear to meet expectations concerning traditional media use, but not necessarily when it comes to digital media use. The paper concludes by proposing the IMPROVER AESOP guidelines to help operators meet public expectations.

Background

Research has consistently shown that citizens seek information from any available media channels during disasters, as demonstrated during large-scale incidents such as the Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011) (Burger, Gochfeld, Jeitner, Pittfield, & Donio, 2013; Mitomo, Otsuka, Jeon, & Cheng, 2013). Social media has been identified as an increasingly important source of information. Recent surveys conducted in the European Union found that 43% of respondents used social media to look for information during a past emergency (Reuter et al., 2016) and more recently 45% had used social media to either share and/or find information (Reuter et al. 2019). Indeed, both Facebook and Twitter were heavily used to find out information in Germany during the European Floods in 2013 (Kaufhold et al., 2016). But this is also a global trend: during the earthquake incident in Japan in 2011, more than half of Japanese citizens used social media to search for disaster-related information (Takeuchi, Peary, & Shaw, 2012).