Vulnerable populations and social media use in disasters: Uncovering the digital divide in three major U.S. hurricanes

Abstract

How populations use social media in disasters is essential for evaluating the representation of subpopulations while analyzing social media data for emergency response and disaster research. Existing machine learning models can extract, characterize and make sense of digital trace data from social media, but are unable to account for diversity in population groups and use of social media. Consequently, the reliability of their decision-making ability remains questionable. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of empirical household survey data on the information seeking, sharing activity, and perceptions of information reliability on social media platforms across different population groups during three major hurricane storm events in the United States between 2017 and 2018. The results of this analysis suggest significant associations between social media use and socioeconomic factors: (1) Socioeconomic factors along with geographic effects play a role in determining not only platform uptake but both motivations for information seeking and the action of information sharing on social media, (2) The type of social media platform influences the type of information people seek, (3) Households from lower socioeconomic and minority backgrounds were more likely to seek out different information on social media from their peers, (4) perceptions of information reliability are also influenced by social divides, where households in rural areas, lower income groups, and racial minorities were more likely to report greater unreliability in social media information. These findings provide new insights into the roles of social media use in creating or dismantling the digital divide during disasters.