The wildfire paradox: How social media quickens response but strains resources

Social media posts are a double-edged sword for public agencies that respond to emergencies such as wildfires.

New research from the University of Waterloo shows that while posts by citizens who see emergencies in the making can help first responders spring into action more quickly, they may also lead to costly overreaction.

"A post that contains useful location or situational information may help speed up response, but highly emotional posts with limited informational content can also amplify urgency and unintentionally distort how resources are allocated," said Dr. Garros Gong, who led the study as a PhD student in management science and engineering at Waterloo.

To assess the impact of social media on emergency response costs and effectiveness, researchers analyzed detailed data on California wildfires and related posts on Twitter, now called X, between 2007 and 2021.

The study builds on previous work by the research team that found monitoring social media activity can help firefighters and other first responders identify and react to emergencies faster.

Their new findings, obtained by filtering out irrelevant 'noise' from the social media signal during wildfires, suggest it can also have a costly downside if public attention and pressure lead to over-allocation of firefighters and other resources.

"While it was expected that social media could improve responsiveness, it was surprising to find that beyond a certain point, the same visibility can reduce operational efficiency in terms of suppression costs per acre," said Gong, who was supervised by Dr. Stan Dimitrov, a professor of management science and engineering.

To help emergency agencies deal with what they call the "visibility-efficiency paradox," researchers developed a tool that tracks social media posts during the early stages of an emergency and quantifies its seriousness by weighing factors including population and location.

Gong said such insights will be increasingly valuable as the costs of wildfires in terms of deaths, property damage and suppression climb along with their rising frequency worldwide.

"The key lesson is not that agencies should ignore social media, which is now part of the operating environment," Gong said. "The real challenge is how to govern the attention pressure it creates.

"Our findings suggest that agencies should pair fast responses with clearer escalation thresholds, disciplined resource-trigger rules and post-event reverse audits to ensure public visibility improves responsiveness without pushing systems into costly over-allocation."

The study, Sustainable wildfire management meets social media: How virtual interaction affects wildfire response costs, appears in the journal Production and Operations Management.