Tweet Factors Influencing Trust and Usefulness During Both Man-Made and Natural Disasters

ABSTRACT To this date, research on crisis informatics has focused on the detection of trust in Twitter data through the use of message structure, sentiment, propagation and author. Little research has examined the usefulness of these messages in the crisis response domain. Toward detecting useful messages in case of crisis, in this paper, we characterize tweets, which are perceived useful or trustworthy, and determine their main features. Our analysis is carried out on two datasets (one natural and one man made) gathered from Twitter concerning hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the Boston Bombing 2013. The results indicate that there is a high correlation and similar factors (support for the victims, informational data, use of humor and type of emotion used) influencing trustworthiness and usefulness for both disaster types. This could have impacts on how messages from social media data are analyzed for use in crisis response

DETECTING PANIC POTENTIAL IN SOCIAL MEDIA TWEETS

A high degree of real-time interconnectedness can aid information transmission, particularly in disaster situations. However, it can have substantial negative consequences when information is emotionally laden and transmits these emotions, particularly the emotion of panic, to the individual across social media in an already grave situation. Prior research has shown that information laden with emotion spreads through social network faster than otherwise. Hence, we highlight the need to understand and curtail potentially panic-causing information, without compromising on good quality information from being available for effective crisis communication and management. With this research, we present the necessity of detecting the panic potential of social media messages, and aim to address two research questions: What are the features, and metrics necessary, to compute and evaluate the panic potential of a social media message (respectively)? Our planned analysis takes the case of the Munich shooting incident, 2016, based on user tweets immediately after the incident. Different features and evaluation metrics are proposed and discussed. The work aims to detect panic potential of messages in social media networks during disasters

A Data Quality Multidimensional Model for Social Media Analysis

Social media platforms have become a new source of useful information for companies. Ensuring the business value of social media first requires an analysis of the quality of the relevant data and then the development of practical business intelligence solutions. This paper aims at building high-quality datasets for social business intelligence (SoBI). The proposed method offers an integrated and dynamic approach to identify the relevant quality metrics for each analysis domain. This method employs a novel multidimensional data model for the construction of cubes with impact measures for various quality metrics. In this model, quality metrics and indicators are organized in two main axes. The first one concerns the kind of facts to be extracted, namely: posts, users, and topics. The second axis refers to the quality perspectives to be assessed, namely: credibility, reputation, usefulness, and completeness. Additionally, quality cubes include a user-role dimension so that quality metrics can be evaluated in terms of the user business roles. To demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, the authors have applied their method to two separate domains: automotive business and natural disasters management. Results show that the trade-off between quantity and quality for social media data is focused on a small percentage of relevant users. Thus, data filtering can be easily performed by simply ranking the posts according to the quality metrics identified with the proposed method. As far as the authors know, this is the first approach that integrates both the extraction of analytical facts and the assessment of social media data quality in the same framework.Funding for open access charge: CRUE-Universitat Jaume

Barriers to Use of Social Media by Emergency Managers

Social media (SM) are socio-technical systems that have the potential to provide real-time information during crises and thus to help protect lives and property. Yet, US emergency management (EM) agencies do not extensively use them. This mixed-methods study describes the ways SM is used by county-level US emergency managers, barriers to effective SM use, and recommendations to improve use. Exploratory interviews were conducted with US public sector emergency managers to elicit attitudes about SM. This was followed by a survey of over 200 US county level emergency managers. Results show that only about half of agencies use SM at all. About one quarter of agencies with formal policies actually forbid the use of SM. For both disseminating (sending out) and collecting information lack of sufficient staff is the most important barrier. However, lack of guidance/policy documents is the second highest rated barrier to dissemination via SM. Lack of skills and of the training that could improve these skills is also important. For collecting data, trustworthiness and information overload issues are the second and third most important barriers, which points to the need for appropriate software support to deal with these system-related issues. There are few differences associated with agency characteristics. By understanding important barriers, technologists can better meet the needs of emergency managers when designing SM technologies

The Social Media Intelligence Analyst for Emergency Management

The Social Media Intelligence Analyst is a new operational role within a State Control Centre in Victoria, Australia dedicated to obtaining situational awareness from social media to support decision making for emergency management. We outline where this role fits within the structure of a command and control organisation, describe the requirements for such a position and detail the operational activities expected during an emergency event. As evidence of the importance of this role, we provide three real world examples where important information was obtained from social media which led to improved outcomes for the community concerned. \ \ This is the first time a dedicated role has been formally established solely for monitoring social media for emergency management intelligence gathering purposes in Victoria. To the best of our knowledge, it is also the first time such a dedicated position in an operational crisis coordination centre setting has been described in the literature

Public Attention to Environmental Hazards

Although public attention has been noted as being influential within the hazard-response cycle, it has received almost no consideration within the risk and hazards literature. This is surprising, as attention is often noted in other disciplines for bridging the gap between information and action, and therefore public attention is highly relevant to the study of risk communication and response. It is prudent, therefore, to draw insights on public attention from other disciplines and bring them to bear on challenges pertaining to the human dimensions of environmental hazards. This dissertation presents original research that investigates this important issue. The first manuscript examines the use of Facebook after a significant tornado event that occurred in southern Ontario, Canada in August 2011. The results of this research underscore the usefulness of Facebook and Facebook groups for information seeking, decision support, and misinformation management. The second manuscript investigates the ways that Twitter was used by different actors groups (e.g., weather professionals, weather enthusiasts, news media, first responders, and citizens) during a second tornado-warning storm that affected southern Ontario, Canada in September 2016. The results of this research underscore the fact that Twitter is a powerful platform for the interpretation of both official and unofficial weather information. This interpretation is an iterative process that occurs both individually and collectively—a process that is often referred to as sense-making. The results of the second manuscript also highlight the fact that activity on Twitter can be indicative of professional, rather than “public”, attention to severe weather. The final manuscript draws on theoretical and empirical insights from research across numerous disciplines in order to frame the concept of public attention. Next, theoretical insights from the existing literature on public attention were taken together with empirical insights gained from the two original research projects, in order to develop a conceptual model of public attention. This model shows the process of attention creation from the initial point of exposure, to the iterative and collaborative process of sense-making, to an outcome (i.e., perception, decision, or action). The results of this dissertation emphasize the usefulness of public attention as a lens through which social scientists and other researchers can explore human behaviour when confronted with uncertainty—a topic that is of interest across the social sciences

‘War against our Children’: Stance and evaluation in #BringBackOurGirls campaign discourse on Twitter and Facebook

The #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook was not only a global campaign for the release of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, but also a campaign for the rights of female children and girls to formal education. This article applies the appraisal framework and (critical) discourse analysis to examine the discursive features of this campaign and the role of affective stance in the evaluation of social actors in the campaign discourse. Findings reveal that #BringBackOurGirls (https://twitter.com/hashtag/BringBackOurGirls?src=hash) campaign exhibits a great deal of affect at the level of vocabulary reflecting moods, feelings and emotional language in the representations of persons, groups and governments. Most of the evaluations reflect negative valence, which is often typical of public reactions to (social) media reports of crisis, or national disasters. The article argues that social media campaigns and activisms can be fruitful if they are followed up by practical offline actions; otherwise, they will end up as mere skacktivism. Some of the campaigners themselves argued that the campaign could not have been successful if the girls were not rescue

A Neural Network-Based Situational Awareness Approach for Emergency Response

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DYNAMICS OF IDENTITY THREATS IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS: MODELLING INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

This dissertation examines the identity threats perceived by individuals and organizations in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The research constitutes two major studies. Using the concepts of Value Focused Thinking and the related methodology of Multiple Objectives Decision Analysis, the first research study develops the qualitative and quantitative value models to explain the social identity threats perceived by individuals in Online Social Networks. The qualitative value model defines value hierarchy i.e. the fundamental objectives to prevent social identity threats and taxonomy of user responses, referred to as Social Identity Protection Responses (SIPR), to avert the social identity threats. The quantitative value model describes the utility of the current social networking sites and SIPR to achieve the fundamental objectives for averting social identity threats in OSNs. The second research study examines the threats to the external identity of organizations i.e. Information Security Reputation (ISR) in the aftermath of a data breach. The threat analysis is undertaken by examining the discourses related to the data breach at Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase in the popular microblogging website, Twitter, to identify: 1) the dimensions of information security discussed in the Twitter postings; 2) the attribution of data breach responsibility and the related sentiments expressed in the Twitter postings; and 3) the subsequent diffusion of the tweets that threaten organizational reputation