Abstract
Communication channels play a crucial role in times of crisis, especially during disasters. Social media have become substantial means of communication, playing coextensive roles to those of traditional media. Social media present a communication format that can operate not only within areas directly affected by a disaster but also throughout the rest of the world. Twitter has proven to be an important social media platform for providing services and information conveyed by credible organizations in times of crisis when other means of communication become inaccessible. This study focuses on the different uses of Twitter during disasters in Asia and the Pacific in 2014 and 2015. The purpose of this study is to show the pattern of use of Twitter to send warnings and identify crucial needs and responses. This study is based on the premise that Twitter has considerable potential as a communication channel during disasters given its advantages and high compatibility with rapid information dissemination. We gather tweets by scraping https://twitter.com/search-advanced results using the Application Programming Interface of Twitter. The scraping process is conducted with the Python Tweepy library. Data are classified based on a social media framework, geographical area, and user type. We find that the pattern of Twitter users plays a crucial role in raising awareness as well as coordinating relief efforts during disasters. Various types of users utilize Twitter in ways that are consistent with its traditional role. News organizations participate in secondhand reporting, and nongovernment organizations and celebrities are committed to relief coordination. Results cast light on not only how various types of users utilize Twitter in times of disaster but also on how a number of potential Twitter users are absent during disasters. Twitter use for relief coordination occurs understandably in the aftermath of a disaster, but the speed and reach of Twitter make it an ideal platform for disaster preparedness coordination and planning.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acar A, Muraki Y (2011) Twitter for crisis communication: lessons learned from Japan’s tsunami disaster. Int J Web Based Commun 7(3):392–402
Ahmed YA, Ahmad MN, Zakaria NH (2016) Towards exploring factors that influence social media-based knowledge sharing intentions in disaster management. J Theor Appl Inf Technol 88(3):487–498
Alexander DE (2014) Social media in disaster risk reduction and crisis management. Sci Eng Ethics 20:717–733
Al-Saggaf Y, Simmons P (2014) Social media in Saudi Arabia: exploring its use during two natural disasters. Technol Forecast Soc Change 95:3–15
Aulov O (2014) Retrieving quantifiable social media data from human sensor networks for disaster modeling and crisis mapping. UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Baltimore
Barnes MD, Hanson CL, Novilla LM, Meacham AT, McIntyre E, Erickson BC (2008) Analysis of media agenda setting during and after Hurricane Katrina: implications for emergency preparedness, disaster response, and disaster policy. Am J Public Health 98(4):604–610
Baskaran U, Ramanujam K (2018) Automated scraping of structured data records from health discussion forums using semantic analysis. Inform Med Unlocked 10:149–158
Bird D, Ling M, Haynes K (2012) Flooding Facebook—the use of social media during the Queensland and Victorian floods. Aust J Emerg Manag 27(1):27–33
Bonifacio C, Barchyn TE, Hugenholtz CH, Kienzle SW (2014) CCDST: a free Canadian climate data scraping tool. Comput Geosci 75:13–16
Boyle MP, Schmierbach M, Armstrong CL, McLeod DM, Shah DV, Pan Z (2004) Information seeking and emotional reactions to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Journal Mass Commun Q 81(1):155–167
Briones RL, Kuch B, Liu BF, Jin Y (2011) Keeping up with the digital age: how the American Red Cross uses social media to build relationships. Public Relat Rev 37(1):37–43
Carley KM, Malik M, Landwehr PM, Pfeffer J, Kowalchuck M (2016) Crowd sourcing disaster management: the complex nature of Twitter usage in Padang Indonesia. Saf Sci 90:48–61
Chatterjee R (2014) Social media get the right stuff to India’s flood victims, NPR. gets-the-right-stuff-to-indias-flood-victims
Chunara R, Andrews JR, Brownstein JS (2012) Social and news media enable estimation of epidemiological patterns early in the 2010 Haitian cholera outbreak. Am J Trop Med Hyg 86:39–45
Drabek TE, McEntire DA (2002) Emergent phenomena and multiorganizational coordination in disasters: lessons from the research literature. Int J Mass Emerg Disasters 20(2):197–224
Earle P, Guy M, Buckmaster R, Ostrum C, Horvath S, Vaughan A (2010) OMG earthquake! can Twitter improve earthquake response? Seismol Res Lett 81(2):246–251
Esser F, Hanitzsch T (eds) (2012) The handbook of comparative communication research. ICA handbooks. Routledge, London
Finch KC, Snook KR, Duke CH, Fu KW, Ho Tse ZT, Adhikari A, Fung ICH (2016) Public health implications of social media use during natural disasters, environmental disasters, and other environmental concerns. Nat Hazards 83:729–760
Fraustino JD, Liu B, Jin Y (2012) Social media use during disasters: a review of the knowledge base and gaps. Technical report, science and technology directorate. U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Gao H, Barbier G, Goolsby R (2011) Harnessing the crowdsourcing power of social media for disaster relief. IEEE Intell Syst App 26(3):10–14
Goodchild MF, Glennona JA (2010) Crowdsourcing geographic information for disaster response: a research frontier. Int J Digit Earth 3(3):231–241
Guan X, Chen C (2014) Using social media data to understand and assess disasters. Nat Hazards 74:837–850
Hjorth L, Kim KY (2011) The mourning after: a case study of social media in the 3.11 earthquake disaster in Japan. Telev New Media 12(6):552–559
Hollis S (2015) Regional disaster risk management. In: The role of regional organizations in disaster risk management. Palgrave Macmillan, London
Holthaus E (2014) National weather service finally entering a committed relationship with Twitter, Slate
Houston JB, Hawthorne J, Perreault MF, Park EH, Hode MG, Halliwell MR, McGowen SET, Davis R, Vaid S, Mc Elderry JA, Griffith SA (2014) Social media and disasters: a functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research. Disasters 39(1):1–22
Hughes AL, Palen L (2009) Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. Int J Emerg Manag 6:248–260
Hughes AL, Palen L, Sutton J, Liu SB, Vieweg S (2008) Site-seeing in disaster: an examination of on-line social convergence. In: Proceedings of the 5th international ISCRAM conference, Washington, DC
Java A, Song X, Finin T, Tseng B (2007) Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on web mining and social network analysis. https://doi.org/10.1145/1348549.1348556
Kongthon A, Haruechaiyasak C, Pailai J, Kongyoung S (2014) The role of social media during a natural disaster: a case study of the 2011 Thai flood. Int J Innov Technol Manag 11(3):1–12
Krishnamurthy B, Gill P, Arlitt M (2008) A few chirps about twitter. In: Proceedings of first workshop online social network. https://doi.org/10.1145/1397735.1397741
Laituri M, Kodrich K (2008) On line disaster response community: people as sensors of high magnitude disasters using internet GIS. Sensors 8(5):3037–3055
Landwehr PM, Carley KM (2014) Social media in disaster relief. In: Chu WW (ed) Data mining and knowledge discovery for big data, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 225–257
Leetaru K, Wang S, Cao G, Padmanabhan A, Shook E (2013) Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: the geography of Twitter. First Monday [S.l.], 4/2013. ISSN 13960466
Liu BF, Fraustino JD, Jin Y (2015) How disaster information form, source, type, and prior disaster exposure affect public outcomes: jumping on the social media bandwagon? J Appl Commun Res 43(1):44–65
Liu BF, Fisher JDF, Jin Y (2016) Social media use during disasters: how information form and source influence intended behavioral responses. Commun Res 43(5):626–646
Low R, Burdon M, Christensen S, Duncan W, Barnes P, Foo E. (2010) Protecting the protectors: legal liabilities from the use of Web 2.0 for Australian disaster response. In: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE international symposium on technology and society. IEEE, pp 411–418
MacEachren AM, Jaiswal A, Robinson AC, Pezanowski S, Savelyev A, Mitra P, Zhang X, Blanford J (2011) SensePlace2: GeoTwitter analytics support for situational awareness. Conference Paper. https://doi.org/10.1109/VAST.2011.6102456
Manoj B, Baker AH (2007) Communication challenges in emergency response. Commun ACM 50(3):51–53
Middleton SE, Middleton L, Modafferi S (2014) Real-time crisis mapping of natural disasters using social media. Soc Intell Technol 29(2):9–17
Mileti DS, Darlington JD (1997) The role of searching in shaping reactions to earthquake risk information. Soc Probl 44(1):89–103
Murthy D, Gross A, Pensavalle A (2016) Urban social media demographics: an exploration of twitter use in major American cities. J Comput Mediat Commun 21:33–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12144
Neubaum G, Rosner L, Rosenthal-von der Pütten AM, Krämer NC (2014) Psychosocial functions of social media usage in a disaster situation: a multi-methodological approach. Comput Hum Behav 34:28–38
Olteanu A, Vieweg S, Castillo C (2015) What to expect when the unexpected happens: social media communications across crises. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp 994–1009
Palen L, Vieweg S, Liu S, Hughes AL (2009) Crisis in a networked world: features of computer-mediated communication in the April 16, 2007 Virginia tech event. Soc Sci Comput Rev 27(4):467–480
Pan J, Vorvoreanu M, Zhou Z (2014) Social media adoption in disaster restoration industry. Constr Innov 14(3):346–369. https://doi.org/10.1108/CI-03-2013-0014
Poulsen K (2007) Firsthand reports from California wildfires pour through Twitter. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/firsthand-repor/. Accessed 30 July 2018
Power R, Robinson B, Colton J, Cameron M (2014) In: Hanachi C, Bénaben F, Charoy F (eds) Information systems for crisis response and management in mediterranean countries. Proceedings of the first international conference, ISCRAM-med 2014, Toulouse, France, October 15–17. Springer, New York
Procopio CH, Procopio ST (2007) Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Internet communication, geographic community, and social capital in crisis. J Appl Commun Res 35(1):67–87
Quarantelli EL (2005) A social science research agenda for the disasters of the 21st century: theoretical, methodological and empirical issues and their professional implementation. In: Perry RW, Quarantelli EL (eds) What is a disaster: new answers to old questions. Xlibris Corporation, Bloomington, pp 325–396
Robinson L, Bawden D (2017) The story of data: a socio-technical approach to education for the data librarian role in the city LIS library school at city, university of London. Libr Manag 38(6/7):312–322
Sakaki T, Okazaki M, Matsuo Y (2010) Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors. In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web. https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772777
Sakaki T, Toriumi F, Uchiyama K, Matsuo Y, Shinoda K, Kazama K, Kurihara S, Noda I (2013) The possibility of social media analysis for disaster management. In: IEEE region 10 humanitarian technology conference Sendai, Japan
Spiro E, Irvine C, DuBois C, Butts C (2012) Waiting for a retweet: modeling waiting times in information propagation. In: 2012 NIPS workshop of social networks and social media conference. http://snap.stanford.edu/social2012/papers/spiro-dubois-butts.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2018
Starbird K, Palen L (2010) Pass it on? Retweeting in mass emergencies. In: Proceedings of conference on information systems on crisis response and management (ISCRAM 2010). http://www.cs.colorado.edu/*palen/starbirdpaleniscramretweet.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2018
Stiegler R, Tilley S, Parveen T (2011) Finding family and friends in the aftermath of a disaster using federated queries on social networks and websites. In: 2011 13th IEEE international symposium on Web systems evolution (WSE). IEEE, Melbourne, pp 21–26
Sutton J et al (2013) Tweeting the spill: online informal communications, social networks, and conversational microstructures during the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill. Int J Inf Syst Crisis Response Manag 5:58–76
Takahashi B, Tandoc EC Jr, Carmichael C (2015) Communicating on twitter during a disaster: an analysis of tweets during typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Comput Hum Behav 50:392–398
Tang Z, Zhang L, Xu F, Vo H (2015) Examining the role of social media in California’s drought risk management in 2014. Nat Hazards 79:171–193
Thomson R, Ito N, Suda H, Lin F, Liu Y, Hayasaka R et al (2012) Trusting tweets: the Fukushima disaster and information source credibility on Twitter In: 9th ISCRAM conference, p 10
Tinker T, Vaughan E (2010) Risk and crisis communications: best practices for government agencies and non-profit organizations. Booz Allen Hamilton, McLean, p 30
United Nation ESCAP (2015) Disasters in Asia and the Pacific: 2014 year in review. www.unescap.org
United Nation ESCAP (2016) Disasters in Asia and the Pacific: 2015 year in review. www.unescap.org
United States Department of Homeland Security (USDHS) (2014) Using social media for enhanced situational awareness and decision support, virtual social media working group and DHS first responders group June 2014, United States Department of Homeland Security—Science and Technology Directorate
Vieweg S, Hughes AL, Starbird K, Palen L (2010) Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI conference human factors computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753486
Weng L, Flammini A, Vespignani A et al (2012) Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Sci Rep 2:335
Woo H, Cho Y, Shim E, Lee K, Song G (2015) Public trauma after the sewol ferry disaster: the role of social media in understanding the public mood. Int J Environ Res Public Health 12(9):10974–10983
Wray RJ, Becker SM, Henderson N, Glik D, Jupka K, Middleton S, Mitchell EW (2008) Communicating with the public about emerging health threats: lessons from the pre-event message development project. Am J Public Health 98(12):2214–2222
Xiao Y, Huang Q, Wu K (2015) Understanding social media data for disaster management. Nat Hazards 79:1663–1679
Zhang W, Leung Y, Fraedrich K (2015) Different El Niño types and intense typhoons in the Western North Pacific. Clim Dyn 44:2965–2977. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2446-4
Zhao WX et al (2011) Comparing twitter and traditional media using topic models. In: Clough P et al (eds) Advances in information retrieval. Springer, Dublin, pp 338–349
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kusumasari, B., Prabowo, N.P.A. Scraping social media data for disaster communication: how the pattern of Twitter users affects disasters in Asia and the Pacific. Nat Hazards 103, 3415–3435 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04136-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04136-z