During Tuesday’s terror attacks in Lower Manhattan, in which a driver in a pickup truck killed eight people and injured 11, Snap Maps, the location-sharing feature that Snapchat introduced this summer, proved to be an effective way to get real-time information on what was happening.
Incredible how quickly footage of something like the reported shooting in lower Manhattan surfaces on Snap Maps pic.twitter.com/yZSQS66DW2
— Damon Beres ✨ (@dlberes) October 31, 2017
The remarkable thing about Snapchat is that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, you feel assured that you're getting footage from actual humans
— Damon Beres ✨ (@dlberes) October 31, 2017
Snap Maps is lit up with footage of shooting that just happened in lower Manhattan. An incredible realtime perspective tool. pic.twitter.com/7eQ3ltIbMH
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) October 31, 2017
Snap Maps showing what's happening in lower Manhattan right now. Looks like a car accident connected to the shooting pic.twitter.com/j7J10GIGx6
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) October 31, 2017
Tuesday wasn’t the first tragedy in which Snap Maps proved a reliable source of information. Quartz’s Mike Murphy wrote last month about the tool’s role in covering the Las Vegas shootings, hurricanes in the U.S. and Mexico, and the Mexico City earthquake — and why it can be more useful and more intimate than coverage of breaking events on Facebook and Twitter.
People opening Periscope or Twitter are expecting to broadcast their stories, whereas on Snapchat, you’re assuming only a few people might ever see whatever you post, unless something profound happens. And popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook are great for firing off quick messages or images, but there’s no easy way for a user to check everything that’s happening in an area, unless they follow specific hashtags, or know how to perform advanced searches. On Snapchat, you open the app, pinch in to see the map, and point to the part of the world you want to see.
As a result, for those who use it, Snap Maps has become a deeply intimate way to view major news events in real time.
Snapchat’s algorithm decides what makes it onto the public map: “We have automated systems that decide what makes it onto the Map, based on a bunch of factors — like when and where a Snap was taken, if an event seems to be happening nearby, etc.”
There are, of course, some annoying and jarring things about following a serious event in this way (the stickers! the emoji! is that the crying laughing emoji?).
Yes, Snap Maps gives us real time footage of breaking events but we also have to deal with inane commentary like "no school for me lol!!"
— sabrina majeed (@sabrina) October 31, 2017
But watching event coverage on, say, cable news certainly exposes one to inane commentary as well, and at least this is immediate — and also authentic (at least for now).
