Social media crowdsourcing for rapid damage assessment following sudden-onset earthquakes

Rapid appraisal of damages related to hazard events is important to first responders, government agencies, insurance industries, and other private and public organizations. While satellite monitoring, ground-based sensor systems, inspections, and other technologies provide data to inform post-disaster response, crowdsourcing through social media is an additional and novel data source. In this study, the use of social media data, principally Twitter postings, is investigated to make approximate but rapid early assessments of damages following earthquake disasters. The goal is to explore the potential utility of using social media data for rapid damage assessment after sudden-onset hazard events and to identify insights related to potential challenges. This study defines a text-based damage assessment scale for earthquake damages and then develops a text classification model for rapid damage assessment. The 2019 Ridgecrest, California earthquake sequence is mainly investigated as the case study. Results reveal that Twitter users rapidly responded to this sudden-onset event, and the damage estimation shows temporal and spatial characteristics. The generalization ability of the model is validated through the investigation of damage assessment for another five earthquake events. Although the accuracy remains a challenge compared to ground-based instrumental readings and inspections, the proposed damage assessment model features rapidity with large amounts of data at spatial densities that exceed those of conventional sensor networks

The Web of False Information: Rumors, Fake News, Hoaxes, Clickbait, and Various Other Shenanigans

A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific topics. These false information campaigns can have dire consequences to the public: mutating their opinions and actions, especially with respect to critical world events like major elections. Evidently, the problem of false information on the Web is a crucial one, and needs increased public awareness, as well as immediate attention from law enforcement agencies, public institutions, and in particular, the research community. In this paper, we make a step in this direction by providing a typology of the Web's false information ecosystem, comprising various types of false information, actors, and their motives. We report a comprehensive overview of existing research on the false information ecosystem by identifying several lines of work: 1) how the public perceives false information; 2) understanding the propagation of false information; 3) detecting and containing false information on the Web; and 4) false information on the political stage. In this work, we pay particular attention to political false information as: 1) it can have dire consequences to the community (e.g., when election results are mutated) and 2) previous work show that this type of false information propagates faster and further when compared to other types of false information. Finally, for each of these lines of work, we report several future research directions that can help us better understand and mitigate the emerging problem of false information dissemination on the Web

‘Add Twitter and Stir’:The Use of Twitter by Public Authorities in Norway and UK during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak

This article examines how Norwegian and UK health authorities used social media, and especially Twitter, during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak. The microblogging service has been regarded as a promising medium for crisis communicators due to its immediacy and dialogical potential. Twitter allows communicators to respond directly to users? concerns and provide them with more precisely tailored information. However, scholars have raised questions over organizations? ability to respond to the the medium. We address these questions in two ways: 1. we examine the social media strategies adopted by the health authorities at the time of the outbreak. 2. we conduct an analysis of tweets produced by health authorities concerning the Ebola outbreak. Our analyses display some differences between UK and Norwegian authorities in terms of the strategies they adopted and the tweets they produced. However, neither country fully exploited Twitter?s dialogical potential. Both countries authorities preferred a vertically integrated approach with minimal opportunities for the public to engage and little monitoring of the wider Twitter ?conversations?. We conclude that the emergence of social media has not led to a paradigm shift in crisis communication for these countries? health authorities, rather to an evolution and adaption of practices and policies.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Assessing the growing impact and potential of social networking mediums in crisis communication in South Africa : A Case Study of the South African Protection of State Information Bill

Includes bibliography.With new political developments breeding opportunities for crises, proliferation of new media types increasing exposure to crises, there is a growing awareness of the potential, influence, impact and capabilities of social media. Focusing on South Africa's Secrecy Bill, a crisis with implications on access to information and media freedom, this study provides a discussion of the dynamics of crisis communication online. By undertaking an analysis of the uses of social media during deliberations of the Secrecy Bill and its implications, the study sought to explore how young South Africans have embraced social media as a communication tool. An examination of the literature reveals that younger generations are frequent bloggers and users of Twitter, a popular social media site. Focusing on these two platforms, through a qualitative content analysis, findings show that their contribution to deliberations was mainly to make sense of the crisis and distribute relevant materials relating to the debate

Impact of misinformation on social media on risk perception in a multi-risk environment

Misinformation is not a new phenomenon but, through social media, has gained new dynamics such as the rapidity of spread around the world within a few seconds. Past events have shown that misinformation can worsen the response to an emergency by leading to inappropriate behaviours, triggering fear and anxiety, or reducing the credibility of the measures by official actors. To better understand the dynamics of misinformation on social media or in the press and its effects on people’s beliefs and behaviour, we defined six case studies addressing different hazards and time periods. This allowed us to derive recommendations to prevent and fight the spread of and belief in misinformation along the entire communication chain - source, message, channel, receiver, effect, and feedback. Three of our key results are that: i) official actors should provide information on a regular basis to build credibility and trust, which will allow them to effectively communicate and counter misinformation during emergencies when people are under stressful conditions; ii) fragmented information on social media should be counterbalanced through external links to richer sources, where people can inform themselves about the broader context and details; and iii) the cultural context and ideological debates must be considered to address anchored beliefs and biases when developing strategies to prevent and fight misinformation

Decentring Devices : Developing Quali-Quantitative Techniques for Studying Controversies with Online Platforms

This thesis considers the role of online platforms (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in digital social research from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective and proposes new conceptual, methodological and visual tactics, drawing on a series of empirical case studies concerning controversies over nuclear power. Recent work in STS seeks to map science controversies (GM foods, nanotechnology, climate change, etc. Venturini 2010) using digital tools, which repurpose online platforms for social research (Rogers 2009). Yet these platforms not only provide data about controversies, they may also intervene in them as well andI propose that this requires studying them ‘in action’, drawing on the techniques of controversy analysis (Latour 1987) and actor-network theory (ANT). However, this research presents several challenges. How to delineate a study when controversies transcend particular platforms? How to define what is relevant when these platforms have their own relevance-defining metrics? How to track information flows within or between platforms? The central argument of this thesis is that while researchers should capitalise on the affordances of these platforms, they must diverge from them as well. Theoretically, this means maintaining a tension between studying controversies and studying the platforms themselves. Methodologically this means decoupling methods from platform data structures: scraping less obvious data, juxtaposing quantitative and qualitative traces and presenting data in novel ways. Over three case studies, I will develop a series of mapping techniques for analysing controversies which qualify the quantitative and make the less calculable more calculable, revealing imbalances in the articulation and dissemination of controversies online which would remain hidden to platform-specific or qualitative approaches on their own. These exploratory techniques, which draw on work in the sociology of scientific representations (Woolgar and Lynch 1992), have implications for debates about big data, digital sociology, media studies and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies

ELECTRONIC WORD-OF-MOUTH: APPLICATIONS IN PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION AND CRISIS INFORMATION DISSEMINATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

“Tutteli to Japan”: A case study of spontaneous collaboration in disaster response

“Tutteli to Japan” (TTJ) is a case study of ordinary people, a group of Japanese women living in Finland, trying to figure out how to help disaster-affected citizens from a distance in coordination with likeminded strangers on-the-ground to accomplish aid supply delivery. Unlike commonly seen in citizen response to disasters, this case did not start as an extension of pre-existing social group activities or an informal group of volunteers under the name of TTJ. Rather, the effort emerged from individual responses on the Internet to the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami disasters in Japan, expressing their compassions and aspirations to do something for the disaster victims; some were on Twitter, some were on their blogs. As the devastation escalated, so did the people’s eagerness to do something about the inadequate distribution of resources, with a focus on the breastfeeding mothers in Japan who only had access to powder-based baby formula. Having this challenge left untouched by government or aid agencies, these concerned individuals, as novice learners of international aid work without a chain of command, continued seeking and sharing information in order to deliver the liquid baby formula regardless of informational, operational, and situational uncertainties surrounding them. Within the next forty days, these volunteer individuals were able to ship six times, a total of 12,000 cartons of formula, directly delivered and distributed to the hands of breastfeeding mothers in twelve different locations in the disaster-affected communities in Japan. In this dissertation, I study the entangled, mutually collaborative nature of finding a way to help processes within and between like-minded individuals and the broader context of people and information with emphasis on information needs and learning. Drawing on a dataset that encompasses a range of real-time social media data as well as interviews and documentation, this single-case study traces how ordinary citizens interacting online develop the idea for delivery of baby formula as emergency supplies and how these like-minded strangers collaboratively mobilized resources for the TTJ logistics and processes of packaging, dispatching and delivering large volumes of relief supply including: the fundraising volunteers in Finland, the drivers and distributors in Japan. This study aims to describe how such ordinary people’s information interactions shape spontaneous collaboration in disaster response. My findings suggest that independent public participation and collaborative efforts for disaster response perform as sources of tensions and various kinds of vagueness, but these are the functions that spontaneous volunteers can offer resourcefully. With learning by doing approaches, these compassionate individuals, both online and on-the-ground, muddled through unknown needs of unfamiliar activities in identifying, managing and processing different kinds of tasks, particularly by asking for information and acting on information received including uses of vague language and uncertain sources of information. This iteration of dual processes – searching for information to help and self-organizing under leaderless management – illuminates underlying processes of spontaneous collaboration. I argue that the TTJ illustrates the power of intention, which is the power of creativity among ordinary people acting on information processed through humane-driven technology use. These iterative information interactions can be best understood through a new concept articulated in this dissertation, shared uncertainty. This concept encompasses our understanding of independent public participation and collaboration and offers an interdisciplinary bridge between research in information behavior, computer-supported cooperative work, crisis informatics and disaster studies