What Twitter Showed About Hawaii's False Missile Alert, January 2018

Summary

• Social media is widely used to share information and spread alerts and warnings.
• On January 13, 2018, a false alert told people in Hawaii to take shelter from an incoming ballistic missile. It took 38 minutes to retract. CDC analyzed Twitter posts from before and after the correction.
• The reactions show how the public interprets, shares and responds to information as a threat unfolds — knowledge that can help emergency communicators write timely, effective messages that protect lives.

What happened

At 8:07 a.m. Hawaii Standard Time, during a ballistic missile preparedness drill, an employee of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent an alert through the Wireless Emergency Alert system (location-based warnings through wireless carriers) and the Emergency Alert System (television and radio), telling people to seek shelter. At 8:45 a.m. — 38 minutes later — the agency retracted it through the same systems.

How it was studied

Researchers searched Twitter for posts from the morning of January 13 using terms such as "missile and Hawaii," "ballistic," "shelter," "drill," "threat," "alert" and "alarm." They set aside retweets and quote tweets to focus on original posts:

Posts were coded with grounded theory, a systematic way of drawing themes out of qualitative data, until no new themes appeared.

What people posted

While the alert stood, four themes emerged:

• Information processing — coming to terms with what seemed an imminent missile strike;
• Information sharing — spreading the alert, often by tagging other users (one tagged U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the White House National Security Council);
• Authentication — trying to confirm whether the alert was real;
• Emotional reaction — shock, fear, panic or terror.

After the correction, sharing and emotion continued, and three new themes — reactions to the misinformation — appeared:

• Insufficient knowledge to act — not having a plan, especially not knowing how to take shelter properly;
• Denunciation — blaming the warning and the response, above all the time it took to correct it;
• Mistrust of authority — doubting the alert system or the government's response.

Why it went wrong

• The agency's investigation found the alert went out during a shift change, and it wasn't understood that the notification was meant as a drill. The Federal Communications Commission reported that the employee believed the threat was real and meant to send a genuine alert — a fundamental misunderstanding that set off the false alarm.
• The exercise plans had no process for sending an all-clear.
• The missile alert checklist didn't include telling the agency's public information officer, and there was no two-person requirement to log in and approve a missile alert.
• Several public authorities did post on Twitter that it was a false alarm.

A lost memory: missile alert drills haven't been held regularly in decades, so many Americans never experienced — or are too young to remember — Cold War exercises. That, combined with instant sharing on social media, can shape how people react. Many users plainly didn't know what to do in a nuclear threat; CDC has guidance on what to do in many kinds of emergency, including a missile strike.

Lessons for communicators

• Coordinate emergency messages across platforms so accurate, timely information reaches the people who need it.
• Address each phase of a crisis: people first need to process, share and verify; later, they need to know what to do and why things happened.
• Build credibility to head off mistrust and denunciation.
• Give clear instructions for people in the affected area.

Limits: coding is subjective, so the tone and sincerity of some tweets could have been misread, and quote tweets — which may carry similar themes — were excluded.

Sources

Based on Bhavini Patel Murthy, Nevin Krishna, Terrance Jones, Amy Wolkin, Rachel Nonkin Avchen and Sara J. Vagi, "Public Health Emergency Risk Communication and Social Media Reactions to an Errant Warning of a Ballistic Missile Threat — Hawaii, January 2018," MMWR, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain.