Messaging Under the Microscope: Evaluating Official Risk Communication During the Marshall Fire

As the risk of impact from wildland fires increases across the United States, GSL’s Social and Behavioral Science Branch has performed research aiming to harness the power of social media to inform citizens during an active wildfire. One of our research social scientists examined how Twitter (now X) users engaged with hazard messaging coming from official voices during the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado. The goal of the research was to identify ways to amplify the reach of risk messaging during a wildfire.

The Marshall Fire caused extensive impacts and destruction as it rapidly spread into highly urbanized areas. Official voices–including media, emergency management, and government offices–used Twitter as an outlet to spread warning and evacuation information during the fire. This research analyzed whether elements of their messages on Twitter led to greater numbers of retweets, likes, replies, and quotes. When a message’s metrics are high, the message has greater diffusion through the social network. This spread is crucial to getting the warning message to a wide audience in a small amount of time.

The research examined how tweet engagement metrics were affected by pictures and video of the fire and smoke, descriptions about what others were doing in response to the fire, recommended safety and threat mitigation efforts, overall information about the threat, as well as other aspects. Interestingly, these elements affected the engagement metrics differently depending on which type of official voice the message was coming from.

How these elements affected the engagement a tweet received seemed to be dependent on whether the included element aligned with the publicly recognized role of the official voice. For example, raw video of the fire and descriptions of others’ actions in response to the fire showed significant increases in tweet engagement for local TV news stations. The expertise of local TV news is in video and telling stories about people–the very elements that increased engagement with their tweets.

For emergency management, safety and mitigation recommendations and threat information resulted in increased engagement, along with the inclusion of video. The public may look at emergency management as having the role of setting safety and evacuation recommendations, as well as being a leading and credible authority on threat information. In essence, people engaged with a source’s messaging and information when it seemed most appropriate coming from that source.

This highlights the reality that it takes a conglomerate of official voices to disseminate all aspects of the warning message. Each official voice should also ensure that it understands its role in the risk communication process to focus on excelling at that role.

Raw video was an engagement booster amongst nearly all official voices, indicating the power of pairing a message with a video from the scene. An individual voice examined in this research–the National Weather Service in Boulder (NWS)–fulfilled the recommendations that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) outlined for hazard communication. The use of lively language, vivid images, empathy, and an “all-clear” statement were noted among NWS tweets with high amounts of engagement.

This research provides helpful information to those posting on social media in an official capacity during a wildfire by examining how risk communication theory and recommendations performed in a real-world scenario.

This is a link to the research published in Natural Hazards

By Cole Vaughn, GSL Social and Behavioral Scientist