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Manila Bulletin devider devider Netizens use social media to seek and give help

Netizens use social media to seek and give help

Published Nov 12, 2020 09:49 am

As Typhoon Ulysses pounds Luzon, social media has become the venue for netizens to update families on their situation, check their friends, and ask for help.

Technology is playing a great role in times of crisis. The onslaught of several typhoons in the past few days proves that social media could be an amazing tool for disasters. I checked what’s happening on social media and found a lot of users asking for rescue.  Here are some of them:

Government agencies, private companies, and individuals are also using social media to give assistance and post important updates about the typhoon.

A few years ago, social media could only be felt after major disasters where you could notice the increase of social media activities of users updating on their situations. Now, social media is there before, during, and after any major disaster.

As it has been proven time and time again that private individuals, government agencies, and non-government institutions use social media to send and receive disaster-related messages, we need to look at this venue deeper and conduct a thorough study on how we could harness its power. We could use social media in disaster management and the best way to start is for the government to have a unified feedback mechanism to answer posts about updates and calls for help.

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