Managing social media in a crisis

What we now know is that the January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt in Washington, D.C., was preceded by months of preparation and messaging via social media. The FBI, police, and others knew about it but apparently viewed it as overstated bravado that would not ultimately come to fruition... bad judgment that gave us one of the worst days in American history.

Kylie Kinnaman of TVP Communications advises that higher education needs to carefully follow and respond to social media on campus. In times of heightened political discord and threat of actual violence, the advice includes; revisit the campus social media policy, make sure an incident response team and communication templates are ready for release, provide transparent and frequent updates, monitor social media outside the institution, pause other campus events and communication, and complete a postmortem when it's over.

Kinnaman does not address decisions about reporting social media posts or denial of access to platforms, which has become prominent since Donald Trump's access to social media were revoked following his use of these platforms in allegedly advocating insurrection. Twitter's decision has been lauded by some as a potentially transformative ethical stance that will have implications far into the future. However, conservative criticism on social media has claimed that Trump's banishment was denial of free speech. It's important that campuses have a honed and widely communicated policy that defines what comprises protected speech versus speech that threatens and ultimately draws hostile and violent groups together. The latter is not protected speech and everyone on campus should understand that.