Local information sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Benjamin Freixas Emery,Peter Sheridan Dodds,Christopher M. Danforth,Meredith T. Niles,Naoki Masuda

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251704

Abstract

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall across the Caribbean region as a category 4 storm. In the aftermath, many residents of Puerto Rico were without power or clean running water for nearly a year. Using both English and Spanish tweets from September 16 to October 15 2017, we investigate discussion of Maria both on and off the island, constructing a proxy for the temporal network of communication between victims of the hurricane and others. We use information theoretic tools to compare the lexical divergence of different subgroups within the network. Lastly, we quantify temporal changes in user prominence throughout the event. We find at the global level that Spanish tweets more often contained messages of hope and a focus on those helping. At the local level, we find that information propagating among Puerto Ricans most often originated from sources local to the island, such as journalists and politicians. Critically, content from these accounts overshadows content from celebrities, global news networks, and the like for the large majority of the time period studied. Our findings reveal insight into ways social media campaigns could be deployed to disseminate relief information during similar events in the future.

Highlights

1.1 BackgroundIn the early morning of September 20th 2017, Puerto Rico was struck by its first Category 4 hurricane in 85 years [1]
The Puerto Rican government accepts an independent study approximating that 2,975 deaths resulted from the storm and its aftermath [4], estimates from other
Our links are generated from a 10% sample of tweets and we reduce our corpus by content type, we maintain a third of the nodes from our original user list due to the heavy-tailed nature of online social networks [35]

Summary

Introduction

In the early morning of September 20th 2017, Puerto Rico was struck by its first Category 4 hurricane in 85 years [1]. Hurricane Maria made landfall with wind speeds of 155 miles per hour, just 2 miles per hour short of qualifying as a Category 5 hurricane. The island’s electrical grid, which had been left in highly vulnerable condition as a result of the territory’s extreme debt [2], was entirely wiped out. Most of the island was left without power for nearly two months, and some areas remained without power for nearly a year [3]. The Puerto Rican government accepts an independent study approximating that 2,975 deaths resulted from the storm and its aftermath [4], estimates from other.

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Conclusion