Do 'Pray for...' messages make disaster relief harder?

ponder

ponder

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41261784

Do 'Pray for...' messages make disaster relief harder?

By Gareth Evans BBC News 14 September 2017

Magan was in Dallas, which is over 200 miles (320km) away from Houston where the flooding was most severe. But when she saw people needed help she posted her details on social media and offered to put people in touch with rescuers on the ground.

"People couldn't post their information to get rescued. So I hopped on and offered them to text me the info," she says. Magan used Facebook, and a walkie-talkie app called Zello, to send the locations of people who needed to be rescued to volunteer rescuers who were patrolling Houston by boat.
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But her work was made more difficult by the massive amount of activity on social media during the storm.
"The Facebook page became an issue when non-essential posts were clogging it up. As much as we would've liked to have answered every post that came through, it was impossible," she says.
"At one point, in the middle of Harvey, we had issues accessing the page in general and had to turn it off so that we were able to review the posts and pin locations."
So does the huge surge in non-essential posts during these disasters cause more harm than good?
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More here http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41261784
 
Here's your answer:
she had no formal training or official role in the emergency response.
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It reads like she simply got overwhelmed with responses and shut down. Literally.
 
Probably not more than the pictures people upload and/or MEMEs and what else though to be fair.
 
Online virtue signalling. You see it everywhere. Annoys me immensely.
 
Mephisto_Helix said:
Pretty petty article imo ....... slow day mebbe
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If you belong to a something like a community watch whatsapp group it might make more sense. **** goes down and you get bombarded with prayers and irrelevant chatter while others are trying to get info through wrt to police, ambulances, traffic etc. It might be social media but it works bloody well and way faster than calling 10118 etc as all the main parties are part of the group as well. If you see what happens on the two groups I belong to and how fast the response is it's actually awesome.
 
ponder said:
If you belong to a something like a community watch whatsapp group it might make more sense. **** goes down and you get bombarded with prayers and irrelevant chatter while others are trying to get info through wrt to police, ambulances, traffic etc. It might be social media but it works bloody well and way faster than calling 10118 etc as all the main parties are part of the group as well. If you see what happens on the two groups I belong to and how fast the response is it's actually awesome.
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100% Agree with you on that scale yep. WA community groups less clutter the better and that's why they work so well (belong to 2 down here). I just think the FB article was wishy washy because I've never seen important stuff being drowned out on FB groups unless the admin is a poephol and doesn't know how to set things right and 'gets overwhelmed', heh
 
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