Crisis informatics, disinformation and emergency politics

A key question in crisis informatics is how social media and other forms of many-to-many communication can be utilized as sources of actionable information in public emergencies. Reviewing crisis informatics literature before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, this study finds that the issue of social media veracity took on new significance during the pandemic, as policymakers became increasingly concerned about medical misinformation and disinformation. Changes to the guidelines, policies, and business practices of social media platforms, especially X, have also presented social media studies and crisis informatics with new methodological challenges. The contribution of this article is to employ the concept of ‘emergency politics’ to unpack assumptions in the field of crisis informatics in which social media are understood mainly as resources for citizen engagement, and to discuss the ramifications of pandemic and post-pandemic developments in the social media communication space for the future of crisis informatics research. Highlighting impacts of emergency measures on the flow of information on social media platforms, the study also contributes to the critical literature on social media surveillance and freedom of expression during states of emergency.