Think local, retweet global: Retweeting by the geographically-vulnerable during Hurricane Sandy

M Kogan, L Palen, KM Anderson - … of the 18th ACM conference on …, 2015 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative …, 2015dl.acm.org
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 …
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.
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