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Effective crisis communication can be defined as “the provision of effective and efficient messages to relevant audiences during the course of a crisis process” (Freberg et al., 2013:186). Since the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008 social media has been used in crisis times for sharing disaster information and build situational awareness (Latonero & Shvlovski, 2010; Potts, 2014). This has led to the development of a series of guidelines for blue light organisations, such as police, firefighters, rescue services, etc. who use blue light sirens, as well as emergency managers on how best to use social media as a tool for crisis communication. For example, EU projects DRIVER, CascEff, COSMIC and EMERGENT have all produced guidelines. Various national governments also have guides. Previous research in this emergent area has tended to focus solely upon how these actors or the public use social media in crisis times (The American Red Cross, 2009; Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012; Imran, Castillo, Diaz, & Vieweg, 2015; Reuter & Kaufhold, 2018; Reuter, Kaufhold, Spielhofer, & Hahne, 2017; Reuter, Ludwig, Kaufhold, & Spielhofer, 2016), often overlooking the role played by another key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. Thus, there have been few empirical studies exploring public expectations of information shared by CI operators during crisis situations. This paper attempts to address this gap by answering the following four research questions:
RQ1: What do European citizens expect of CI operators in regard to information provision during crisis situations?
RQ2: Are there any noticeable similarities/differences between public expectations based on nationality or other demographic factors?
RQ3: How do these declared expectations compare to the current communication efforts of CI operators?
RQ4: How can CI operators meet these expectations?
It does so by drawing on key themes that emerged from a review of the literature on public expectations of disaster related information shared via social media (Section 2). Then the methodology (Section 3) and the results (Section 4) of an online questionnaire and interview-based study of disaster-vulnerable communities in France, Norway, Portugal and Sweden are described. Afterwards, the findings are discussed with regard to social media use by CI operators during disasters (Section 5). Our findings show that the public have high expectations to be provided information, but less high in regard to answering comments on social media. CI operators appear to meet expectations concerning traditional media use, but not necessarily when it comes to digital media use. The paper concludes by proposing recommendations for how CI operators can use social media to communicate with the public during crisis situations (Section 6).