How social media stoked the false shooter panic at LAX

No shots were fired at the Los Angeles International Airport Sunday night, but if you were browsing Twitter during the evening hours, you may have thought otherwise.

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Los Angeles Airport police officers did not identify a shooter. Those false reports came shortly after officials had arrested a man wearing a mask and sporting a plastic sword in Terminal 7, however.

"Immediately following" the arrest, according to the airport's news release, police received reports of an active shooter in Terminal 8.

"Word spread quickly through the terminals by word-of-mouth, social media, and additional calls were made to Airport Police about an active shooter in other terminals, with some reporting having heard gunshots," the release read.

It would be the second time in two weeks that false reports of an active shooter ended up shutting down a major U.S. airport -- with Twitter fueling the panic by providing scenes that reinforced the false information. That information was consumed by the public, but also people on the scene.

J.P. Mangalindan, a reporter for Yahoo Finance (and formerly of Mashable), was one of those people. His tweets captured some of the raw fear from the scene.

"I make a move to join them when airport security tells me to get on the ground and not to move. I call my parents (my mom, stunned, gives me the same instructions), shoot off a few frantic texts to close friends, tweet and update Facebook," he wrote of his experience.

Once authorities established that there had been no shooter, the airport gradually reestablished its usual operations. The event in total lasted less than two hours.

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Despite the social media flood, however, Twitter did not dictate the narrative of the night for the police department. Los Angeles Airport Police Officer Robert Pedrego told Mashable that the first report of the masked man had been from a 911 phone call, and they also received multiple phone calls about a shooter.

But officials did monitor the microblogging site. "Any time we get a call for service, we have to take it seriously. We can’t discount it. We have to investigate it," Pedrego said. "If we get a report from social media, we take it as thoroughly as a phone call."

Similarly to other crises or events, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks became a hub of first-person reports. NBC's Nightly News anchor Lester Holt tweeted and created Facebook Live videos while on the tarmac. His post read, "Shots fired at LAX."

So, not everything was accurate at the time.

"We’ve just become more and more mobile, almost everyone traveling has their cell phone," said Betsy Page Sigman, professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, who specializes in social media and information systems. "We’ve become trained lately to pay attention to the latest thing on the news. We just had the airport attack in Turkey two months ago and [scare in] JFK. People are on edge, and they’re checking the news."

International airports have come to implement social media in their emergency response strategies. LAX, in particular, had identified Twitter as an important resource following a 2013 shooting at the airport that left a TSA agent dead and seven injured.

That event did not lead to anything like the panic seen in the last two weeks in which no shots were fired.

"PIOs and their incident command leadership need to plan for and embrace social media technology as part of pre-incident planning," a 2014 report on the shooting conducted by the Los Angeles World Airport reads.

"A lot of the recommendations have been implemented," said Mary Grady, managing director of media and public relations at Los Angeles World Airports. "One of the gaps we had in 2013 that we’ve been working really hard to address is the communication gap."

To sort through the noise on Twitter, Los Angeles Airport Police officials used Geofeedia, a location-based social monitoring tool. The department has been using the service off and on for the last year.

But on Sunday resources were, for the most part, already deployed. "There were lots of tweets and retweets of information, but we had already begun our protocol so we were already in response there," Pedrego said.

Whether or not social media could have sped up the response is unclear. Due to false reports, 281 flights were delayed. Two were cancelled.

The department did, however, tap its Twitter accounts @flyLAXairport and @LAAirportPD to share confirmed reports.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter, the airport made announcements over the speakers in each of the terminals issuing an evacuation. Officials also put up banner announcements on the monitors and outside the airport.

Still, those monitors aren't always accessible. "If you’re hiding in the back of a store, you’re not going to see the monitors. You have police officers clear the building and knock on doors. You have to have people convince them," according to John Cohen, formerly counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security and now a professor at Rutgers University.

The smartphone serves as another convenient conduit. For the first time at LAX, officials used the Wireless Emergency Alert System at the onset of the emergency and after the situation was clear. The system, which is also used for AMBER Alerts and extreme weather, sends mobile alerts to any smartphone within a 5 mile radius.

But for those looking to share their thoughts, social media acted as the medium. In some cases, LAX's official accounts responded individually to misinformation. The responses were not immediate, but officials said that one-to-one messaging on Twitter was not the main priority.

"There was so much that was already on social media. We just wanted to get out and started telling people what we could," Grady said.

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