Which is thepotential of social networks like Twitter and Facebook to coordinate people? According to an international study published in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), in which scientists from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) participate, mobilization through social networks in natural disasters, political campaigns, health emergencies, etc. it isfast but has certain limits. And although they can be a very useful tool when coordinating people in critical situations, they have found that the risk of failure of such a strategy is high.
To demonstrate this, the researchers posed a practical problem: how long would it take (using only social media) to find a person in the United States? “The answer we have obtained is that it is two days on average, but there is also a high risk that this time is greater than one month”, reveals one of the authors, Esteban Moro, professor at the UC3M Department of Mathematics and member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems. Researchers from the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Australian research center NICTA and the universities of California in San Diego (USA) also participated in the study. or Edinburgh (Scotland).
In the experiments, the scientists used the results of an experiment carried out in 2009 by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States (USA) as a scenario. The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of social networks in human mobilizations where time was a critical factor. To do this, a contest was held with a prize of $ 40,000 in which the participants were invited tolocate ten randomly hidden weather balloons in the US in the shortest time possible. The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), managed to locate them in nine hours.
In the investigation, the scientists ran hundreds of computer simulations with the geographic, demographic, and strategy information used by the team that won this challenge posed by DARPA. And the conclusion they have reached is thatthe weather balloons could have been located exclusively through social networks, without the help of conventional communication media (radio, television, newspapers), although with certain limits. “The results indicate that such a social mobilization would only be successful under certain optimal conditions,” the study indicates. One of the critical factors for success, in this sense, is that the users participating in the mobilization not only have many social ties but are also effective in circulating information quickly, for example.
