Twitter is a major tool for communication during emergencies and disasters. This study
aimed to investigate Twitter use during natural hazards and pandemics. The included studies reported
the role of Twitter in disasters triggered by natural hazards. Electronic databases were used for a
comprehensive literature search to identify the records that match the mentioned inclusion criteria
published through May 2020. Forty-five articles met the selection criteria and were included in the
review. These indicated ten functions of Twitter in disasters, including early warning, dissemination
of information, advocacy, assessment, risk communication, public sentiment, geographical analysis,
charity, collaboration with influencers and building trust. Preventing the spread of misinformation
is one of the most important issues in times of disaster, especially pandemics. Sharing accurate,
transparent and prompt information from emergency organizations and governments can help.
Moreover, analyzing Twitter data can be a good way to understand the mental state of the
community, estimate the number of injured people, estimate the points a_ected by disasters and
model the prevalence of epidemics. Therefore, various groups such as politicians, government,
nongovernmental organizations, aid workers and the health system can use this information to plan
and implement interventions.
Twitter; disaster; risk reduction; preparedness; response; recovery
Social media such as micro blogging services have a significant impact on the day-to-day lives of people. These
services are currently being used by government agencies to interact and communicate information to general
public. They also bring an effective collaboration of all stakeholders for dissemination of information during an
emergency. Social media is capable of providing spontaneous information during emergency/disaster situations
unlike news media, therefore, particularly micro blogging services, have the potential to be adopted as an
additional tool for emergency services. In the present work the authors by mining real time data from twitter TM
tried to predict the impending damage in the following days during flood scenario. The users of twitter provide
important information such as warnings, location of an event, first hand experiences. Such information is
collected, preprocessed, geo located and filtered. From the collected information, geo-coded data is prioritized
to that of text data. Then the data is analyzed to find the course of the disaster through regression analysis. Later,
disaster curve is extrapolated for prediction of damage susceptible locations in the following days. The results
are validated by analyzing the past events. In this study, 2015 Chennai flood data is used to validate the results.
The study has the potential to facilitate disaster managers for better response operations during emergencies.
Data mining, disaster computing, Chennai floods, sentiment polarity score.
In recent years, social media has exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content, share
it, bookmark it and network at a prodigious rate. The five key characteristics of social media: collectivity;
connectedness; completeness; clarity and collaboration lend itself to be used increasingly to support crisis
management functions. This paper examines the various categories of social media tools to understand how they
can be utilised to enhance analytical and response capabilities of organisations for crisis management.
The paper identified four main social media functions: (1) information dissemination, (2) disaster planning and
training, (3) collaborative problem solving and decision making, and (4) information gathering, which are then
mapped onto the three crisis management phases of preparedness, response and recovery to describe how a
range of social media tools may be used to enhance crisis communications. Case examples of international
organisations and governments using social media for crisis management are shared.
The paper proposes a framework to enhance government use of social media for crisis management that
encompasses the need for a mandate, differentiated guidelines and three key capabilities to be developed.
Emergency management practices are being reshaped by social media. Emergency responders are embracing
social media to enhance communications during an emergency. The integration of social media into UK
emergency management is ambigious, and it is uncertain as to whether it is an effective tool. Using a mixed
methods approach, this research investigates the UK emergency responders use of social media for emergency
management, focusing in particular on the UK Winter Floods of 2013/14. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the
UK emergency responders’ social media activity is examined. This research shows that the responders perceive
social media as a useful tool to effectively deliver information to the public, although they do not appear to fully
exploit it in an emergency. While the responders appear to predominantly post caution and advice, the results
suggest that information about structures and utilities affected by an incident is most likely to engage an
audience.
UK floods; emergency management; social media; audience engagement; mixed methods; Twitter; emergency responders;
emergency communications; local resilience forums; thematic analysis.
Twitter data are a valuable source of information for rescue and helping activities in case of natural disasters and
technical accidents. Several methods for disaster- and event-related tweet filtering and classification are
available to analyse social media streams. Rather than processing single tweets, taking into account space and
time is likely to reveal even more insights regarding local event dynamics and impacts on population and
environment. This study focuses on the design and evaluation of a generic workflow for Twitter data analysis
that leverages that additional information
to characterize crisis events more comprehensively. The workflow covers data acquisition,
analysis and visualization, and aims at the provision of a multifaceted and detailed picture of events that happen
in affected areas. This is approached by utilizing agile and flexible analysis methods providing different and
complementary views on the data. Utilizing state-of-the-art deep learning and clustering methods, we are
interested in the question, whether our workflow is suitable to reconstruct and picture the course of events
during major natural disasters from Twitter data. Experimental results obtained with a data set acquired during
hurricane Florence in September 2018 demonstrate the effectiveness of the applied methods but also indicate
further interesting research questions and directions.
event characterization, natural disasters, spatio-temporal analysis, Twitter
One of the main challenges of emergency management lies in communicating risks to the public.
On some occasions, risk communicators might seek to increase awareness over emerging risks,
while on others the aim might be to avoid escalation of public reactions. Social media accounts
offer an opportunity to rapidly distribute critical information and in doing so to mitigate the
impact of emergencies by influencing public reactions. This article draws on theories of risk and
emergency communication in order to consider the impact of Twitter as a tool for
communicating risks to the public. We analyse 10,020 Twitter messages posted by the official
accounts of UK local government authorities (councils) in the context of two major emergencies:
the heavy snow of December 2010 and the riots of August 2011. Twitter was used in a variety of
ways to communicate and manage associated risks including messages to provide official
updates, encourage protective behaviour, increase awareness and guide public attention to
mitigating actions. We discuss the importance of social media as means of increasing confidence
in emergency management institutions.
This paper considers how emergency response organizations utilize available social media technologies to communicate
with the public in emergencies and to potentially collect valuable information using the public as sources of information on
the ground. The authors discuss the use of public social media tools from the emergency management professional’s
viewpoint with a particular focus on the use of Twitter. Limited research has investigated Twitter usage in crisis situations
from an organizational perspective. This paper contributes to the understanding of organizational innovation, risk
communication, and technology adoption by emergency management. An in-depth longitudinal case study of Public
Information Officers (PIO) of the Los Angeles Fire Department highlights the importance of the information evangelist
within emergency management organizations and details the challenges those organizations face engaging with social
media and Twitter. This article provides insights into practices and challenges of new media implementation for crisis and
risk management organizations.
Emergency Management, Evangelism, Fire Department, Organizations, Risk Communication, Social Media, Twitter
In this paper, we introduce Tweedr, a Twitter-mining tool that extracts actionable information for
disaster relief
workers during natural disasters. The Tweedr pipeline consists of three main parts: classification,
clustering and
extraction. In the classification phase, we use a variety of classification methods (sLDA, SVM, and
logistic
regression) to identify tweets reporting damage or casualties. In the clustering phase, we use filters to
merge
tweets that are similar to one another; and finally, in the extraction phase, we extract tokens and
phrases that
report specific information about different classes of infrastructure damage, damage types, and
casualties. We
empirically validate our approach with tweets collected from 12 different crises in the United States
since 2006.
Keywords
Social network analysis, text mining, social media, disaster response
This article explores current literature to identify the main uses of Twitter in emergency
management over the past ten years in Australia and overseas. It finds several uses across the
‘disaster cycle’ including as a medium for identifying hazard risk, community engagement for
disaster mitigation and preparedness, early warning communication, crowdsourcing to provide
real-time information, emotional support, identifying needs and vulnerabilities of affected
communities, and allocating resources during recovery. This paper concludes by examining some
relatively untapped uses of Twitter in building disaster resilience including for social capital
formation, capacity building, disaster virtual communities-of-practice, and social change.
This study aims to explore the use of Twitter by Disaster and
Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) in 2021, which is determined
as the year of disaster education. Within the scope of this study, the tweets
of the AFAD Presidency in the media section between January 1, 2021,
and December 31, 2021, were examined. The tweets were categorized
considering hazard types (geological, hydrological and climatological,
biological, technological accidents and Chemical Biological Radiological
Nuclear (CBRN), forest fires, migration, and other) and phases of the disaster management cycle (pre-disaster
(mitigation, and preparedness),
response, and post-disaster recovery). Five hundred and eighty tweets
related to disasters were identified including the number of 88 disaster
irrelevant tweets. Most of the tweets were related to hydrological and
meteorological hazards. Regarding the biological disaster-induced
COVID-19, only two tweets specific to the response process were identified.
This study provides an overview of the characteristics and the potential role
of social media in risk communication. These institutions can provide the
risk information and work closely with the media to reach and share with
the community.
Keywords: Disaster; risk communication; Twitter; community-based resilience;
Turkey.
Social media plays increasingly significant roles in disaster response, but effectively leveraging
social media for rescue is challenging. This study analyzed rescue requests on Twitter during the
2017 Hurricane Harvey, in which many residents resorted to social media to call for help. The
objectives include: (1) understand the characteristics of rescue-request messages; (2) reveal the
spatial-temporal patterns of rescue requests; (3) determine the social-geographical conditions of
communities needing rescue; and (4) identify the challenges of using social media for rescue and
propose improvement strategies. About half of rescue requests either did not provide sufficient
information or neglected to include rescue-related hashtags or accounts. Of the 824 geocoded
unique rescue requests, 41% were from FEMA-defined minimal flood risk zones. Communities
sending more rescue requests on Twitter were environmentally and socioeconomically more
vulnerable. Finally, we derived a framework summarizing the steps and strategies needed to
improve social media use for rescue operations.
Keywords: social media, emergency rescue, Twitter, Hurricane Harvey, vulnerability
Despite the increasingly prominent role of social media in disaster events,
studies analyzing its use in rescue operations remain scanty. Hurricane
Harvey hit Texas with unprecedented rainfall and flooding in 2017 and
was marked by widespread use of social media for rescue requests. We
conducted a survey of 195 Twitter users in Houston and surrounding
communities who had requested for rescue during Harvey. The objective
was to investigate our targeted group’s socioeconomic and flood
exposure characteristics, report the effectiveness of Twitter, and lessons
learnt and suggestions made for its use in future rescue missions. Survey
revealed that those requesting rescue on Twitter were better educated,
employed (80%), and homeowners (81%). Majority of them were flooded
(87%), but remained satisfied with current location and did not consider
moving. Calling relatives and friends for rescue was most responsive and
yielded higher assistance-provided rate than using Twitter. Our
respondents found Twitter helpful, but identified issues such as not
knowing when volunteers received their requests or whether they would
send help. They suggested promoting Twitter accounts and hashtags
that accept emergency requests. This study provides baseline
information and actionable suggestions for first responders, community
managers, and resilience practitioners to improve future rescue missions.
KEYWORDS
Twitter; social media;
Hurricane Harvey; flooding;
rescue; online survey
Twitter, a popular communications platform, is identified as contributing to improved
mortalityand morbidity outcomes resulting from the 2013 Hattiesburg, Mississippi EF-4
Tornado. Thisstudy describes the methodology by which Twitter was investigated as a
potential disaster riskreduction and management tool at the community level and the
process by which the at-riskpopulation was identified from the broader Twitter user
population. By understanding howvarious factors contribute to the superspreading of
messages, one can better optimize Twitteras an essential communications and risk
reduction tool. This study introduces Parts II, III andIV which further define the
technological and scientific knowledge base necessary for develop‐ing future competency
base curriculum and content for Twitter assisted disaster managementeducation and
training at the community level.
Keywords: Communications, Disaster risk reduction, Prevention and preparedness,
Socialmedia, Twitter