The Great East Japan Earthquake was Japan's first major natural disaster since the rise of social media, and emergency planning outfits have been studying the data from March 11, 2011, in order better use SNS to save lives and help survivors. Online activities related to the current seismic activity in Kyushu have provided more information.

The advantage social media has over traditional media is immediacy. In the case of the 2011 disaster, notifications about the coming tsunami might have saved more lives if they had specifically told people to seek higher ground immediately. As it happened, many people who fled the waves tried to do so in vehicles that got caught in traffic and were swept away.

In Kumamoto, social networks exacerbated a problem associated with the evacuation. According to the Asahi Shimbun, authorities in Kumamoto city had designated facilities for up to 60,000 evacuees but 120,000 showed up following the quakes. Consequently, many were forced to live out of their cars in parking lots. This led evacuees to call for food and other supplies through posts on Facebook and Twitter, which were shared by people all over Japan. In a few hours the needed items were being sent to Kumamoto, but storage centers were unable to handle all the supplies, and there was no way to turn off the flow. As goods were arriving, people continued sharing the original requests for help. On-site personnel were so busy processing deliveries they didn't have time to dispatch the items to where they were needed.

On the positive side, the Asahi Shimbun on April 16 relayed a request from evacuees for a map of evacuation centers and a group of students quickly put together a Google map showing all the centers in the affected areas. The mayor of Kumamoto asked people through Twitter to send him photos of water supply leaks and other problems, and as a result the city was able to facilitate repairs more quickly.

Conventional media coverage was another story. The most controversial piece of TV footage to emerge from the tragedy was the outburst a morning news show reporter elicited from a person outside one of the evacuation centers in Mashiki, the hardest-hit town.

"This isn't something to gawk at," the man yelled.

His reaction to the reporter's presence exemplified the frustration of the evacuees and the general resentment they felt toward the press, who only seemed interested in sensational pictures and heartstring-tugging stories of desperation. This perceived callousness has always been evident to a certain extent in disaster coverage, but this time it seemed more acute thanks to social media, which makes it easier to share images.

It's now generally assumed that the first large temblor on April 14 was a "preshock," but it was strong enough to cause widespread damage and attract news crews from Tokyo. Consequently, media were in Kumamoto when the stronger "main quake" occurred April 16. They experienced it firsthand, meaning TV news shows were filled with footage of people screaming in panic. As Kazuma Yamane, who was there, wrote in the April 28 edition of Nikkei Business Online, "Such coverage from the epicenter of a quake was unprecedented."

The image that captured everyone's attention was that of female employees going door-to-door in a hotel making sure guests were all right instead of rushing out into the street, which is what everyone else was doing. Yamane says that at least one news show compared the women's "selfless" behavior to that of the captain of the doomed Sewol ferry that sunk off the coast of South Korea two years ago. He abandoned ship before checking on the safety of his passengers.

The women's actions showed the "virtue of the Japanese people," but the real power of the footage was its spontaneous quality, thanks to the TV crew that just happened to be there to capture it. Though the story focused on the women, it was, in Yamane's estimation, really about the TV station, which was congratulating itself.

Though the story had human interest appeal, it was not a scoop and didn't provide viewers with news they needed. More to the point, it wasn't any less exploitative than the constant stream of pictures of collapsed houses set against dramatic background music and announcers speaking in exaggerated tones of commiseration. It was this type of coverage that the man in front of the evacuation center reacted against.

But the complaints didn't exclusively target major media. Nasty comments were also aimed at individuals who wanted to show their support for the victims.

One of the most prominent was TV personality Saeko, the ex-wife of Major League Baseball pitcher Yu Darvish. She posted a message on Instagram saying she had just donated ¥5 million to disaster victims and included a photo of the remittance form. Her followers rewarded her with more than 54,000 likes, but the comments leaned toward the negative, with people wondering what "kind of person publicizes their good works" or why it was "necessary to mention the amount."

Compared to the bashing Malia Obama received after American media reported she would be attending Harvard, Saeko's persecution was tame, but it was characteristic of the general online attitude toward people who had the nerve to show how good their intentions were. And it didn't make a difference how much was donated. Fashion model Tsubasa Masukawa received just as much grief for sending ¥57,000 to the Japanese Red Cross as Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son got for giving $500,000 (¥50 million) to the American Red Cross to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It's the (presumably self-serving) sentiment that counts.

There are now 70 million smartphones in Japan. In 2011 there were 10 million. There's no way conventional media can compete. NHK President Katsuto Momii was criticized for instructing news staff to follow the government line on the Kumamoto disaster so as not to "cause anxiety." Anxiety is unavoidable, but in any case, in an emergency such as the one that happened in Kumamoto, people will turn to Twitter before they turn on NHK.