Can standardised hashtags be effective in emergency responses?
The appeal of a standard hashtag is obvious: one agreed label, and everything about an emergency becomes findable in one place. The practice is less tidy.
Several emergencies have been run with an agreed hashtag, promoted by the coordinating bodies and used by agencies, media and affected populations. The record is mixed, and the reasons are consistent enough to be worth stating.
Adoption is uneven and it is not controlled by the people promoting the tag. Agencies adopt it at different times, some never do, and the tag competes with the labels that media organisations and affected communities were already using. The result is that the standard tag captures part of the traffic and the rest stays where it was.
The volume is dominated by the loudest users. A tag that anyone can use will be used heavily by organisations publicising their own response. The material that a person in the affected area needs, which is usually local, practical and posted by someone with a small following, is present and hard to find.
Language is a structural problem. A tag agreed in English does not serve a population that is posting in another language, and the communities most affected are frequently not posting in the language the tag was written in.
Verification does not scale. A standard tag collects accurate information and rumours with equal facility, and in an emergency rumours travel faster. The tag does not carry any signal about reliability, and the moderating capacity does not exist at the volume an emergency produces.
It creates a target. Where the response is contested, a standard tag is also a convenient index of who is involved and where. That is a consideration for organisations whose staff are in the area, and it belongs in the communication plan alongside the rest.
None of this means standardised tags are useless. They are useful for coordination between responding organisations, for media to find official statements, and as a starting point for a search. What they do not do is replace the harder work: talking to the affected population in its own language, through channels it actually uses, and treating the resulting information as something to be verified rather than aggregated. An organisation that adopts the tag and stops there has done the easy part.
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