Let’s say there’s a massive explosion at a housing estate in North London and the local authorities decide to evacuate the area. They set up strategic command at Scotland Yard and pitch an incident tent at Tottenham to direct officers in the field. There is a hierarchy of control here, which has the potential to be hollowed out by the spread of crowd-sourced information. An orderly evacuation might depend upon keeping people in ignorance. Social media is on the side of transparency and immediacy, but also of mass panic and anarchy. Who is in charge? There are insights to be found in the use of “information operations” in counterinsurgency. See Chapter 6 of this US military manual:
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp3_24.pdf