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#pray4victims: Consistencies in Response to Disaster on Twitter

Published:01 November 2018Publication History
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Abstract

This paper studies commonalities in response across disasters in online social networks (OSNs), specifically Twitter. After presenting an algorithm for extracting vocabularies across disasters, we extract type-specific vocabularies for terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and climate-related disasters between 2012 and 2017. Disaster type drives vocabulary similarity: terrorism responses mention an "attack" and law enforcement, earthquake responses mention the quake and its magnitude, and climate-related responses include safety and requests for aid. Across disaster types, tweets regularly mention victims/affected and prayer, consistent with communal coping and social support in crisis aftermath. Using disaster-type vocabularies, we study Twitter as a proxy for severity, correlating casualties to frequencies in Twitter. These vocabularies better correlate with casualties than baseline crisis lexica, especially in western countries. Twitter response and casualties diverge at the maximum, and Twitter response is stronger in Western countries, suggesting perceived severity is driven by additional factors.

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