The Role of “Dark" Social Media in Crisis Management: A Scoping Review

Social media play a crucial role in navigating crises such as pandemics, natural disasters, or other public emergencies. In this context, existing research has primarily focused on examining public social media (e.g., Twitter/X), which offered convenient and ethically acceptable access to digital trace data for analysis. So-called “dark social,” that is, private social media such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or Facebook Groups are equally important tools for crisis management but remain underexplored in the literature. This paper addresses this problem by investigating the role of "dark social" for crisis management and highlighting the importance of distinguishing between private and public social media platforms and features. Using a scoping review methodology, we develop six themes that show how existing works across disciplines have so far examined “dark social” in the crisis management domain. Furthermore, we derive an agenda for future research by illuminating “dark social” from an individual and organisational perspective.