Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral is burning: lets turn to Twitter

Abstract

Further to the fire incident that recently caught the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, we focused on this event to study how people use Twitter features during a fire disaster. We analysed the content of and differences in information disseminated between the two main phases of this man-made disaster (response and recovery phases) and investigated how tweet's features can influence information timeliness during the fire disaster. Our study showed up the following findings: (i) longer tweets (with more words) slow down the spread of information via retweets and this effect is more pronounced during the recovery phase; (ii) the presence of more URLs in tweets speeds up the spread of information via retweets with a bigger effect during the recovery phase; (iii) the number of hashtags in a tweet is not significantly negatively associated with retweet time. However, the bigger is the importance of hashtags used in a tweet, the smaller will be the average time between that tweet and its retweets. Also, during the recovery phase, the effect of the 'hashtag importance' variable is reduced; and (iv) the number of followers and the number of tweets posted by an active twitterer reduce the average retweet time. In addition, it appeared that the total number of retweets of a tweet and the number of Twitter friends of an active twitterer increase the average retweet time.