Over the two weeks in which the Chennai rains dominated any and all conversation, civilians took to the streets to ensure badly affected areas were rehabilitated. Simultaneously, a few unsung heroes (with access to the Internet) worked tirelessly to inform volunteers on the ground where to go and whom to help. Frequent users of social media were glued to their portable devices, sharing any and all public posts relating to rescue, relief, and donations. Even corporates entered the arena to do their bit to help the community.
The power of the retweet
Muskaan Dutta (@KameeniChhori) is a Chennai-based social media influencer. She made full use of her large base of over 12,000 followers on Twitter, and took to it to continuously share whatever information came her way. “Without social media I don’t think we could have managed to gather such a staggering number of volunteers,” said Muskaan. “It also helped greatly in coordination with volunteers on the ground. Even though the network was patchy, WiFi was operational up to some point in time in certain areas, so communication was facilitated.”
Shantanu Basrur, who works as a product manager at restaurant search and discovery service Zomato, commented on this as well. “Social media has begun to play a pivotal role in relief and rescue efforts across the globe, and that’s exactly what we saw in Chennai. The low latency and inherent virality of social media makes it easier to mobilise people to help,” said Basrur.
“On the ground, despite patchy mobile data connectivity, people used social media to tremendous effect. The #ChennaiMicro hashtag, for example, helped curate crucial information on the situation in the worst-hit areas, aid requirements and, most importantly, ensured that relief work could be carried out in an organised manner.”
Corporates step in
Additionally, Zomato started an initiative that entailed buying a meal for a flood-affected person in Chennai for every meal a customer ordered through the site. The service, which Basur wrote about in an extensive post on Medium, partnered with restaurants that offered to cook thousands of meals to be packed and sent to Chennai to be distributed to people stranded in the floods. “When we opened the window to enable people to buy meals to be sent to affected areas in Chennai (which we at Zomato would match, meal-for-meal), we relied entirely on social media to get the word out. There were no press releases, but people ensured the word spread far and wide. We could get real-time information from reliable sources on Twitter and relay it to our volunteers, making sure they weren’t left guessing where to go next.” he added.
Quashing rumours
Sadly, while social media helped the cause extensively, false and misleading rumours did the rounds quite often, confusing frustrated civilians and volunteers. Additionally, according to Muskaan, a lot of messages were being recycled. Rescue and relief requests that had been put out hours or even days earlier, were seen being circulated for days.
Chennai natives Sowmya Rao and Vijaynarain Rangarajan, two of the main individuals behind the information aggregator ChennaiRains.org, spoke about how the team acted to quash all false information and rumours. “We were very keen to stop the spread of rumours and false information, especially because we knew the city was on edge. An entire team of volunteers was monitoring tweets using #AreaUpdates to ensure that only relevant and verified information was reaching people. The team reached out to government officials and experts to verify all rumours — whether it was lake breaches or crocodiles.
“In particular, one rumour that we were able to successfully discredit was the one that claimed that the Thalambur lake had breached and Semmenchery and Kelambakkam were going to get flooded. Our team, including users @Sumants and @Soba08, immediately reached out to the government emergency room, which verified that this was false news. On hearing this, we tweeted to all our followers confirming this was a rumour, and asking people to stay calm.”
Basrur also commented on this, bringing up an instance in which Zomato was also the victim of a baseless rumour. “There was a Facebook post which said there were 90,000 food packets in the Zomato office, and volunteers could go collect them from there to distribute. In fact, there weren’t 90,000 food packets in our office – we were receiving food from various restaurants and directing them to areas that needed them the most. This post was shared by hundreds of people (maybe more), and despite our best efforts to correct the information, it went viral and a lot of people believed this to be true. Some people even turned up at the address mentioned in the post and found nothing, leaving them angry and disappointed,” he concluded.