Natural disasters and social media

 

If Pinky and the Brain taught us one thing, it's that taking over the world is difficult, but then again, Facebook and Twitter makes it look pretty easy (except when it comes to China where Facebook is officially banned).

Over the past decade social media usage has been one of the most rapidly and universally adopted activities since the invention of breathing. More than half of the world's 2.4 billion Internet users sign in to a social network regularly — a figure that is rapidly increasing. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest in the world with a population of 1.06 billion (March 2013).

We all know that social networks connect people. In our regular life this can just mean sharing photos with friends and family as well as spamming our walls with passive aggressive status updates known as ‘Vaguebooking’. But what about when a natural disaster strikes? Can social networks actually have a more useful social function?

• After the 2011 Japanese tsunami there were more than 5,500 tweets per second about the disaster as the public turned to Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and local Japanese social networks to keep in touch with loved ones while mobile networks were down.
• The first reports of the 2008 earthquake in China came from Twitter, not the government.
• During the 2007 California wildfires, the public turned to social media because they thought journalists and public officials were too slow to provide relevant information about their communities.
• Even Instagram, a hipster paradise, has played its part. During Hurricane Sandy 2012, a category one hurricane that swept across the U.S. East Coast, ten storm-related pictures per second were being uploaded onto the site.
• During the earthquake in Haiti, social media users were used as a base for volunteers by Ushahidi, a piece of software that allows digital volunteers to create maps for first responders in a disaster zone.
• After the disaster hit in Japan, Ushahidi was used to create the largest crisis map to date with over 8,000 reports received via social media about shelters, food stores, cell phone charging centers and road closures.

It is becoming a growing trend that people turn to social media platforms during disasters for time-sensitive disaster information, especially when official sources provide information too slowly or are unavailable.

The flu spreads fast, but tweets spread faster.

Time-sensitive information provided by social media during disasters is also useful for officials, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who are beginning to make use of predictive analytics of social data to monitor emerging situations like the recent deadly influenza epidemic in the US. The recent extensive flu outbreak in the US actually began in late October, but it wasn’t widely reported in the media until early December, when the CDC released a public warning highlighting the danger. Six weeks before, in mid-October, Baltimore-based Sickweather sent out a tweet warning users that the flu season was already here. Sickweather, a data-mining application, had scanned millions of Facebook posts and tweets on Twitter for 24 flu-related symptoms and ran them though further linguistic analysis to weed out information unrelated to the flu. That data was then used to plot illness-related mentions to a map.

To self-mobilise.

During disasters, social media users have managed to mobolise emergency relief and ongoing assistance online. In fact, one research group dubbed those who surge to the forefront of digital and in-person disaster relief efforts as “voluntweeters”. During the days following the 2011 London riots, thousands of Londoners took to social networks to help reclaim the streets of London. The @RiotCleanup Twitter page amassed more than 50,000 followers in fewer than 10 hours and was consistently broadcasting cleanup locations and times, along with other pertinent information regarding the initiative.

 

#TheEnd

@Alex Frankcombe