Identifying Crisis Response Communities in Online Social Networks for Compound Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Laura and Covid-19

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Momin, Khondhaker Al, Kays, H M Imran, Sadri, Arif Mohaimin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Momin, Khondhaker Al
Kays, H M Imran
Sadri, Arif Mohaimin
author_facet Momin, Khondhaker Al
Kays, H M Imran
Sadri, Arif Mohaimin
contents Online social networks allow different agencies and the public to interact and share the underlying risks and protective actions during major disasters. This study revealed such crisis communication patterns during hurricane Laura compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Laura was one of the strongest (Category 4) hurricanes on record to make landfall in Cameron, Louisiana. Using the Application Programming Interface (API), this study utilizes large-scale social media data obtained from Twitter through the recently released academic track that provides complete and unbiased observations. The data captured publicly available tweets shared by active Twitter users from the vulnerable areas threatened by Laura. Online social networks were based on user influence feature ( mentions or tags) that allows notifying other users while posting a tweet. Using network science theories and advanced community detection algorithms, the study split these networks into twenty-one components of various sizes, the largest of which contained eight well-defined communities. Several natural language processing techniques (i.e., word clouds, bigrams, topic modeling) were applied to the tweets shared by the users in these communities to observe their risk-taking or risk-averse behavior during a major compounding crisis. Social media accounts of local news media, radio, universities, and popular sports pages were among those who involved heavily and interacted closely with local residents. In contrast, emergency management and planning units in the area engaged less with the public. The findings of this study provide novel insights into the design of efficient social media communication guidelines to respond better in future disasters.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_14970
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Crisis Response Communities in Online Social Networks for Compound Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Laura and Covid-19
Momin, Khondhaker Al
Kays, H M Imran
Sadri, Arif Mohaimin
Social and Information Networks
Online social networks allow different agencies and the public to interact and share the underlying risks and protective actions during major disasters. This study revealed such crisis communication patterns during hurricane Laura compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Laura was one of the strongest (Category 4) hurricanes on record to make landfall in Cameron, Louisiana. Using the Application Programming Interface (API), this study utilizes large-scale social media data obtained from Twitter through the recently released academic track that provides complete and unbiased observations. The data captured publicly available tweets shared by active Twitter users from the vulnerable areas threatened by Laura. Online social networks were based on user influence feature ( mentions or tags) that allows notifying other users while posting a tweet. Using network science theories and advanced community detection algorithms, the study split these networks into twenty-one components of various sizes, the largest of which contained eight well-defined communities. Several natural language processing techniques (i.e., word clouds, bigrams, topic modeling) were applied to the tweets shared by the users in these communities to observe their risk-taking or risk-averse behavior during a major compounding crisis. Social media accounts of local news media, radio, universities, and popular sports pages were among those who involved heavily and interacted closely with local residents. In contrast, emergency management and planning units in the area engaged less with the public. The findings of this study provide novel insights into the design of efficient social media communication guidelines to respond better in future disasters.
title Identifying Crisis Response Communities in Online Social Networks for Compound Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Laura and Covid-19
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14970