Ethical concerns of twitter use for collective crisis response

Previous research on disasters and crises has shown that, in some cases, citizens from affected communities collectively participate in emergency response. Social media technologies now provide local and even non-local citizens an additional means for collective response. By using social media technologies, including Twitter, distributed citizens can generate and disseminate their own crisis-related information to a wide audience bypassing official communications. Researchers have found that citizens use Twitter for information production, broadcasting, brokering, and organization during violent crises [1–2] and natural disasters [3–6]. Although the information behaviors have been analyzed, ethical considerations have yet to be addressed.