Paper Info
Title
Think Local, Retweet Global: Retweeting by the Geographically-Vulnerable during Hurricane Sandy
Abstract
Hurricane Sandy wrought $6 billion in damage, took 162 lives, and displaced 776,000 people after hitting the US Eastern seaboard on October 29, 2012. Because of its massive impact, the hurricane also spurred a flurry of social media activity, both by the population immediately affected and by the globally convergent crowd. In this paper we explore how retweeting activity by the geographically vulnerable differs (if at all) from that of the general Twitter population. We investigate whether they spread information differently, including what and whose content they chose to propagate. We investigate whether the Twitter-based relationships are preexisting or if they are newly formed because of the disaster, and if so if they persist. We find that the people in the path of the disaster favor in their retweeting locally-created tweets and those with locally-actionable information. They also form denser networks of information propagation during disaster than before or after.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2675133.2675218
CSCW
Keywords
Field
DocType
group and organization interfaces,disasters,crisis informatics,protective decision-making,social media,social computing,twitter,social issues
Population,Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Crisis informatics,Social media,Computer science,Knowledge management,Information propagation,Social computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.83
24
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marina Kogan1322.35
Leysia Ann Palen23104340.89
Kenneth M. Anderson31211106.20