CRISIS INFORMATION VETTING :Extending the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication Model

Social media provides users easy access to unpredictable and unfiltered information from multiple sources during crises, further challenging publics to discern the accuracy of the information they receive and to decide how to react subsequently. Although studies using the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model identify how public actively seek and share crisis information when exposed to it during crisis, it remains unknown why and how publics engage with certain crisis information before their information transmission behaviors. Therefore, echoing the need to understand how publics cope in complex crisis situations and how they consume crisis information in accordance with their social media environment, this chapter summarizes recent scholarly efforts in updating the SMCC model by adding information vetting as a new key component of crisis information engagement and crisis coping, grounded primarily in a dual-process model and meta-cognition.\