This week, Victoria and other parts of Australia have received a massive amount of rainfall, creating floods across much of the state. As that significant volume of water finds its unnatural path downriver, homes and businesses are now being flooded.
With hundreds of thousands of Victorians searching for the latest updates, it raises the question, where is the best place to look for updates?
As someone who joined Twitter in February 2008, I fell in love with the platform as the place to turn for both good and bad event coverage. Over the past few days, I’ve watched the #VicFloods and #VicWeather hashtags on TweetDeck and have been largely disappointed in the content there.
Without a doubt the best account to follow is VicEmergency which provides regular updates on flood alerts from ‘watch and act’, to ‘evacuate now’, to the unfortunate final message, ‘it is too late to leave’.
As good as their efforts are, they’re only text, and often what you need during a natural disaster are visuals. When you have family in the impacted areas, it is reassuring that you can get a view of how things are progressing.
Unfortunately, people aren’t turning to Twitter to share photos and videos as they used to at a time like this, they’re turning to TikTok.
TikTok is full of video content from people in the flood impacted areas, sharing their experiences. As hard as it is to see some of the devastations, it is a great place to get the latest content.
We know TikTok’s growth over recent years has been driven by comedy, entertainment, and music, but this feels like an event that really shows how the vertical video platform can shine at a time when people need citizen journalism more than ever before.
It’s also worth noting the massive engagement some of these videos are getting. Right now the top videos on TikTok for #VicFloods have well over 100,000 views in a matter of hours.
If you want a localised video of the situation, just search for the town you or your loved ones are in like Seymour, Echuca, Shepparton + floods i.e. ‘Shepparton floods’ etc.
As the TikTok algorithm goes to work, it’ll understand you’ve been watching more content about floods, so more will show up on your For You Page, keeping you up to date as you kill time and wait to see if you now have waterfront views.
Let us know in the comments where you’re getting your flood updates.
