Communicating earthquake information to the public in Italy: ten years of INGVterremoti

Communicating earthquake scientific information is very important in countries like Italy, where seismic sequences are frequent, seismic risk is high, and people’s perception of risk is strongly affected by fear.

After the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila (central Italy), which claimed 309 casualties and triggered a long lasting dispute among scientists, journalists, citizens, including a suite of criminal and civil trials involving scientists and civil protection officers, the scientific and risk communication in Italy (not only on earthquakes) was facing a crossroad. The first choice (feared at that time by many reporters) was to minimize or even elude public communication, in order to avoid misunderstandings and involvement in litigations. The second possibility was to increase the efforts in public communication, getting closer to citizens. INGV definitely opted for the second choice. In the past ten years the INGVterremoti platform has augmented and differentiated its activities on the web and social media, substantially increasing the number of involved people, which amounts today to several hundreds thousand. The platform consists of a coordinated suite of social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a blog (on wordpress), where we publish both updating during earthquake sequences and scientific topics. Our end users are mostly citizens, but also media and authorities. Our tweets on earthquake activity are often in the first pages of web and TV news magazines.

In September 2018, we started publishing automatic locations/magnitudes for earthquakes in Italy with magnitude equal to or larger than 3, after a careful analysis of the thresholds and of the best format to use, in order to warrant message understandability and to minimize false or incorrect information. This issue is very critical both to provide the best and fastest information to citizens, and to increase people’s trust in scientific information and institutions. These are often blamed by citizens and by media when contradictory information is offered to the public. We will present an analysis of the first 18 months of this testing phase, which has been widely appreciated by the public.