Social Media and Disasters: Integrating Social Media into Local Disaster Response

With the creation of Facebook and Twitter early in the 21st century, social media began to take over normal routes of communication and have since drastically changed how we seek information. Social media has naturally impacted the field of emergency management and disaster response and disaster recovery with those who are impacted seeking information on these social platforms. Social media utilization in local disaster preparedness and response by local political leaders, NGO’s, emergency and relief agencies, and health departments has been limited in implementation and reach due to funding, staffing, training, volume of information involved, and a lack of trust and collaboration. Even with varied implementation in the field of disaster preparedness and response, social media has shifted the needs of individuals worldwide from one-way communication to that of two-way communication, where citizens are now playing the role of journalists. This paper covers local municipalities that have integrated blog networks, Facebook, and/or Twitter post-disaster, lessons learned from their integration, and makes suggestions on how to add social media into local disaster preparedness and disaster response, including the future need for an adaptable social media framework.Master of Public Healt

Processing social media data for crisis management in Athena

During a crisis citizens turn to their smartphones. They report what they see, they comment on other’s reports, they offer their help, support and sympathy and, in doing so, they create vast amounts of data. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and first responders including humanitarian relief agencies are desperately trying to improve their own situational awareness, but can struggle to do so, especially in places that cannot be easily, quickly or safely reached. Since this user-generated content is often posted to social media, LEAs can tap into these resources by analysing this data. However, making sense of this data is not straightforward. In this paper we present a system that is able to process and analyse this data through categorisation and crisis taxonomies, classification techniques and sentiment analysis. This processed data can then be presented back to LEAs in informative ways to allow them to enhance their situation awareness of the current crisis