The Ripples of Fear, Comfort and Community Identity During the Boston Bombings

Abstract

The Boston Marathon bombing event presents a rare opportunity to study how a massive disruptive event triggers emotional contagion. In this work, we use over 180 million geocoded tweets over an entire month to study how Twitter users expressed shared fear, comfort and community identity, over time and across different cities following the bombings. We quantify the level of shared fear by using the sentiment and time-series analyses. The expressions of comfort and community identity are studied based on the emergent use of two hashtags widely adopted after the bombings: #prayforboston and #bostonstrong. We found that these emotional responses varied with their geographical distances from the Boston area. However, statistical analyses show that users’ direct experience of being in Boston predicts the shared fear better, and users’ social networks are more effective in predicting the occurrences of expressing comfort and community identity. Our study has implication in identifying potentially vulnerable population, and predicting the perceived threat in the face of future massive disruptive events such as terrorist attacks.