The Filipino Government’s Official Strategy on Crisis Hashtags

As noted here, the Filipino Government has had an official strategy on promoting the use of crisis hashtags since 2012. Recently, the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office (PCDSPO) and the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (PCDSPO-OPS) have kindly shared their their 7-page strategy (PDF), which I’ve summarized below.

The Filipino government first endorsed the use of the #rescuePH and #reliefPH in August 2012, when the country was experiencing storm-enhanced monsoon rains. These were initiatives from the private sector. Enough people were using the hashtags to make them trend for days. Eventually, we adopted the hashtags in our tweets for disseminating government advisories, and for collecting reports from the ground. We also ventured into creating new hashtags, and into convincing media outlets to use unified hashtags.” For new hashtags, “The convention is the local name of the storm + PH (e.g., #PabloPH, #YolandaPH). In the case of the heavy monsoon, the local name of the monsoon was used, plus the year (i.e., #Habagat2013).” After agreeing on the hashtags, ” the OPS issued an official statement to the media and the public to carry these hashtags when tweeting about weather-related reports.”

The Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (OPS) would then monitor the hashtags and “made databases and lists which would be used in aid of deployed government frontline personnel, or published as public information.” For example, the OPS  “created databases from reports from #rescuePH, containing the details of those in need of rescue, which we endorsed to the National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Council, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Transportation and Communications. Needless to say, we assumed that the databases we created using these hashtags would be contaminated by invalid reports, such as spam & other inappropriate messages. We try to filter out these erroneous or malicious reports, before we make our official endorsements to the concerned agencies. In coordination with officers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development, we also monitored the hashtag #reliefPH in order to identify disaster survivors who need food and non-food supplies.”

During Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), “the unified hashtag #RescuePH was used to convey lists of people needing help.” This information was then sent to to the National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Council so that these names could be “included in their lists of people/communities to attend to.” This rescue hashtag was also “useful in solving surplus and deficits of goods between relief operations centers.” So the government encouraged social media users to coordinate their #ReliefPH efforts with the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s on-the-ground relief-coordination efforts. The Government also “created an infographic explaining how to use the hashtag #RescuePH.”

Earlier, during the 2012 monsoon rains, the government “retweeted various updates on the rescue and relief operations using the hashtag #SafeNow. The hashtag is used when the user has been rescued or knows someone who has been rescued. This helps those working on rescue to check the list of pending affected persons or families, and update it.”

The government’s strategy document also includes an assessment on their use of unified hashtags during disasters. On the positive side, “These hashtags were successful at the user level in Metro Manila, where Internet use penetration is high. For disasters in the regions, where internet penetration is lower, Twitter was nevertheless useful for inter-sector (media – government – NGOs) coordination and information dissemination.” Another positive was the use of a unified hashtag following the heavy monsoon rains of 2012, “which had damaged national roads, inconvenienced motorists, and posing difficulty for rescue operations. After the floods subsided, the government called on the public to identify and report potholes and cracks on the national highways of Metro Manila by tweeting pictures and details of these to the official Twitter account […] , and by using the hashtag #lubak2normal. The information submitted was entered into a database maintained by the Department of Public Works and Highways for immediate action.”

The hashtag was used “1,007 times within 2 hours after it was launched. The reports were published and locations mapped out, viewable through a page hosted on the PCDSPO website. Considering the feedback, we considered the hashtag a success. We attribute this to two things: one, we used a platform that was convenient for the public to report directly to the government; and two, the hashtag appealed to humor (lubak means potholes or rubble in the vernacular). Furthermore, due to the novelty of it, the media had no qualms helping us spread the word. All the reports we gathered were immediately endorsed […] for roadwork and repair.” This example points to the potential expanded use of social media and crowdsourcing for rapid damage assessments.

On the negative side, the use of #SafeNow resulted mostly in “tweets promoting #safenow, and very few actually indicating that they have been successfully rescued and/or are safe.” The most pressing challenge, however, was filtering. “In succeeding typhoons/instances of flooding, we began to have a filtering problem, especially when high-profile Twitter users (i.e., pop-culture celebrities) began to promote the hashtags through Twitter. The actual tweets that were calls for rescue were being drowned by retweets from fans, resulting in many nonrescue-related tweets […].” This explains the need for Twitter monitoring platforms like AIDR, which is free and open source.