Social Media For Disaster Management Research Articles

Using social media in disaster management: The perceptions of emergency responders versus the public

AbstractThis paper investigates the perceptions of professionals (emergency organizations: authorities and first responders) regarding the usage of social media versus the perceptions of the public regarding their expectations concerning the use of social media in communicating emergencies and disasters. It provides a novel perspective on the alignment between perceptions and expectations in disaster social media usage, delving into the structural constraints and opportunities of current practices. The research incorporates qualitative interviews with emergency professionals, a quantitative survey of the general population, and content analysis of social media interactions across seven countries (Israel, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, Norway, and Romania), aiming to discern differing viewpoints on social media's role in crises. It underscores the variations and commonalities between authorities/first responders and the public's perspectives, revealing differences in acceptance and concerns regarding social media use among these stakeholders. The analysis identified three primary themes: cognitive needs, integrative needs, and communication flow, each with specific, interconnected subthemes. These insights emphasize the need for a better understanding of these diverse perspectives to enhance disaster communication. The paper suggests that effectively utilizing social media and crowdsourcing technologies can help bridge the gap between emergency services and the public, fostering more disaster‐resilient societies.

Social media as a tool supporter in disaster management: Comparative analysis between Türkiye and Iraq

ABSTRACT Public information and early warning are key components of social disaster prevention because they can complement planning, and multi-disciplinary coordination and minimize losses. Social media has increasingly become an important communication channel for users to disseminate useful public and emergency information in these incidents. Communications, including web-based services, between governments, communities, and people involved in the management of disasters are mandatory for the purposes of early warning, rescue services, and recovery. Purpose of this article is exploring how people may use or had used the social media applications during the disaster and provide the advantages of social media in disaster management all over the world but specifically for citizens of Türkiye and Iraq. To get the response of the users, a Google form based survey questionnaire was distributed to the users through the internet. Two hundred and eleven persons, from both genders responded, ages ranged from 17 years to above 45, from different educational levels, inhabiting Türkiye (n = 105, 49.8%), Iraq (n = 88, 41.7%), and other countries (n = 18, 8.5%). The study shows that depending on the culture, social media usage behaviors change for disaster situations. During the disaster, Iraqi citizens preferred to use the Facebook application, meanwhile Türkish citizens prefer to use WhatsApp application to communicate. Both, governments and private sector, are invited to establish and continuously update the infrastructure and facilities of an effective social media communication system, plans should be made to encourage all sectors of society to learn how to use social media in the event of a disaster.

Social media in disaster management: review of the literature and future trends through bibliometric analysis

Social media in disaster management: review of the literature and future trends through bibliometric analysis

Examining the Factors that Influence the Use of Social Media for Disaster Management by Coastal Community People of Bangladesh

Aims: To examine how and why did the coastal community people (agriculture, aquaculture and livestock farmers) adopted social media for their disaster management efforts employing Technology Acceptance Model.
 Place and Duration of Study: Batiaghata upazila under Khulna district and Bagerhat Sadar, Chitalmari and Fakirhat upazila of Bagerhat district. Data was collected in February 2023.
 Methodology: Considering 95% confidence level and 10% Margin of Error 96 sample was estimated for the study. However, for addressing non response we collected data from 25 more respondents, thus all together we collected data from 121 samples. The people who use social media, available during interview and voluntarily agreed to provide data were selected purposively as sample. The study was a quantitative research project that used independent t-tests and descriptive statistics to analyze the information gathered. Data was Analyzed using SPSS.
 Results: The study found 94% community people either strongly agreed or agreed that they use social media for gathering disaster information while 96% respondents strongly agreed or agreed to share disaster information with their friends and families. The outcome of the study established the fact that a significant difference exists between coastal community people whose social media site usage was influenced by their perceived usefulness and those whose social media site usage was influenced by their perceived ease of use (p<0.05).
 Conclusion: In coastal Bangladesh social media users gather disaster management information from the media and also share this in their friends and families. There is a high perception of perceive usefulness and ease of use of social media among coastal community people in Bangladesh, particularly Bagerhat and Khulna districts. Therefore, government and non-government organizations need to emphasize on social media as part of enhancing community knowledge and improving practice of disaster management.

Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Crisis Classification for Low-Resource Scenarios

Social media data has emerged as a useful source of timely information about real-world crisis events. One of the main tasks related to the use of social media for disaster management is the automatic identification of crisis-related messages. Most of the studies on this topic have focused on the analysis of data for a particular type of event in a specific language. This limits the possibility of generalizing existing approaches because models cannot be directly applied to new types of events or other languages. In this work, we study the task of automatically classifying messages that are related to crisis events by leveraging cross-language and cross-domain labeled data. Our goal is to make use of labeled data from high-resource languages to classify messages from other (low-resource) languages and/or of new (previously unseen) types of crisis situations. For our study we consolidated from the literature a large unified dataset containing multiple crisis events and languages. Our empirical findings show that it is indeed possible to leverage data from crisis events in English to classify the same type of event in other languages, such as Spanish and Italian (80.0% F1-score). Furthermore, we achieve good performance for the cross-domain task (80.0% F1-score) in a cross-lingual setting. Overall, our work contributes to improving the data scarcity problem that is so important for multilingual crisis classification. In particular, mitigating cold-start situations in emergency events, when time is of essence.

Analyzing and Leveraging Social Media Disaster Communication of Natural Hazards: Community Sentiment and Messaging Regarding the Australian 2019/20 Bushfires

This research presents a new model based on Twitter posts and VADER algorithms to analyze social media discourse during and following a bushfire event. The case study is the Gold Coast community that experienced the first bushfire event of Australia’s severe Black Summer in 2019/2020. This study aims to understand which communities and stakeholders generate and exchange information on disasters caused by natural hazards. In doing so, a new methodology to analyze social media in disaster management is presented. This model enables stakeholders to understand key message themes and community sentiment during and following the disaster, as well as the individuals and groups that shape the messaging. Three main findings emerged. Firstly, the results show that messaging volume is a proxy for the importance of the bushfires, with a clear increase during the bushfire event and a sharp decline after the event. Secondly, from a content perspective, there was a consistent negative message sentiment (even during recovery) and the need for better planning, while the links between bushfires and climate change were key message themes. Finally, it was found that politicians, broadcast media and public commentators were central influencers of social media messaging, rather than bushfire experts. This demonstrates the potential of social media to inform disaster response and recovery behavior related to natural hazards.

Smart Education with Deep Learning and Social Media for Disaster Management in the Pursuit of Environmental Sustainability While Avoiding Fake News

Networking continues to increase day by day to invest increasingly our daily, creating huge volume of various and precise data: it is not easy to collect content, especially in crisis times. We focus on Smart Education proposed as primary tool of a hybrid of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based model to retrieving content efficiently: CNN is used to extract meaningful features from multiple sources, enabling to have qualitative and sure information, notably with an efficient fake news security, and LSTM is used to maintain long-term dependencies in the extracted features with recurrent connections. This model has been compared to previous approaches to the performance of a publicly available dataset to demonstrate its highly satisfactory performance. This new approach makes it possible to integrate artificial intelligence technologies, deep learning, social media and detecting or avoiding fake news into the crisis management model. It is based on an extension of our previous approach, namely disaster management based on short-term memory and education: this experience constitutes a background for this model. It combines representation training with awareness and education, while retrieving pattern information by combining various search results from multiple sources. We have extended it to improve our disaster management model and evaluate it in the case of Covid-19 while obtaining promising results, through past programs and experience that have shown overwhelmingly positive effects of education for vulnerability reduction and disaster risk management, in the pusuit of Environmental Sustainability

Social media and disaster management: investigating challenges and enablers

PurposeThis study aims to investigate barriers and enablers of social media usage by zooming on one specific type of domain: disaster management. First, by systematically reviewing previous studies using a typology to social media usage, this study identifies the challenges often faced. Second, the results are visualized by qualitatively analyzing the focus group discussion data.Design/methodology/approachThis paper opted for an inductive thematic approach of grounded theory, including focus group discussion with ten participants from diverse backgrounds working in the disaster domain. The data is transcribed verbatim and coded using Atlas.ti software.FindingsThe findings suggest that the vogue of social media significantly ascends its usage in disaster management. Regulatory, software, physical, authenticity, cultural and demographic rose as challenges for social media usage in disaster management. Findings further indicate enablers as the rise in mobile penetration, democratic participation, increase in living standards, two-way real-time communication, global reach, expeditious decision-making, no space-time constraint and cheaper source of information. Social media, compared to traditional media, is explored. This study has practical implications in helping authorities understand the barriers and enablers for social media usage in disaster management.Originality/valueQualitative data analysis of social media usage for disaster management has received scant attention. The main takeaway of this research is to offer clear findings of the purview of social media usage for disaster management. It demonstrates the challenges and enablers of disaster management using social media in the Indian context. Results indicate that leveraging social media for disaster management can extend decision-making for effective disaster management.

Use of Social Media in Disaster Management: A Review

Every year several disasters, natural as well as man-made, strike across the globe causing loss of humanlives as well as property. So, the country facing disaster events is pushed many years back due to thedestruction of property and infrastructure. Due to environmental changes number of disaster events areincreasing every year posing challenge to the world regarding prevention, mitigation and management ofdisaster operations. Being unpredictable all natural disasters cannot be prevented completely but by theeffective use of technology, the loss in life and property can be reduced to a greater extent. In this modernera, social media platforms have become a part of daily life and the number of social media users iscontinuously increasing. General public can report the incidents related to disaster events through socialmedia and thus contribute in monitoring of disasters. Effective disaster management is essential to mitigateand minimise the loss of life and property during disaster. Relevant information from social media increasesthe effectiveness of disaster management and hence reduces the impact of natural disasters. In this study aliterature review is conducted on the role of social media in effective disaster management.

Examining the Factors that Influence the Use of Social Media for Disaster Management by Underserved Communities

This study examined the propensity of social media use by underserved communities by drawing on the literature on the digital divide and attribution theory. Specifically, this research explored the factors that can influence the use of social media for disaster management. The study used survey methodology to collect data and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. The results of the study indicate: (1) that the propensity of social media use for disaster management is low for underserved communities; (2) a positive relationship between an individual’s effort and the intention to use social media for disaster management; and (3) a negative relationship between task difficulty and the intention to use social media for disaster management. The study expanded the literature on the use of social media in disaster management. The article also provides both theoretical and practical implications.

SOCIAL MEDIA RESPONSE IN DISASTER MANAGEMENT WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE KERALA FLOODS

A disaster can be any occurrence that can cause damage, ecological disruption, loss of human life, deterioration of health and health services on a scale, sufficient to warrant an extraordinary response from outside the affected community area (WHO). A disaster can be defined as an occurrence either natural or manmade that causes human suffering and creates human needs that victims cannot alleviate without assistance (American Red Cross ARC). Disaster has been classified into natural disasters such as flood, earthquake, cyclones, tsunami, drought, landslides, pest attacks, forest fires, avalanches, etc., and man-made and human induced such as technological, industrial accidents, etc. Recently Kerala has been susceptive to natural disasters due to the diverse changes in its ecology. Kerala witnessed consecutive floods in the year 2018 and 2019. During both these calamities social media played an important role in advocating the means of rescue and relief by effective resource management and consolidation of relief efforts; the victims of the flood utilised social media to seek help whereas the government and unaffected citizens utilised social media to mobilise rescue, camps and collection centre for people to donate to the affected. This study will look into the use of social media in disaster management with special reference to the Kerala floods. The different forms of involvement of social media in the event of this disaster, in terms of disaster preparation and response, will be analysed from the perspective of the government and the citizens. The focus of this paper is on the role of social media in the Kerala floods and how it served as a tool in disaster management.

Role of Social Media in Earthquake: A Systematic Review

Introduction: Social networks can perform a peculiar role in people's communication in the case of crisis and disaster. These media are interactive, digital, or mobile-based tools. Accordingly, the present study aimed to assess the role of social media in earthquakes. Materials and Methods: In this current systematic review, a query was conducted on such databases as Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane for articles in English language, based on the required criteria from 2000 to 2019 regarding the role of social media in disaster. As a result, 13,924 studies were retrieved, among which 3,963 were deleted due to duplication. Finally, among 244 selected articles, 19 full-text articles were analyzed. Result: In the present research, 19 studies were thoroughly reviewed. The findings were assigned to four main categories (identification, notification, requests, as well as storage and retrieval of information) with 12 sub-topics. Most of the main topics and subsets were as follows: medical and food needs, information about the accident, as well as medical and relief services, efforts to save lives, the amount of damage, problems and limitations, post-crisis measures, such as keeping calm, reducing anxiety, avoiding high-risk areas, asking for financial assistance, as well as using the information to provide relief and map the affected areas and evacuation centers. Conclusion: Considering the behavior of people in different geographical locations in the earthquake crisis, it seems that the case study of how to use social media in disaster management carries profound implications for modeling and localizing the cases in related disaster management institutions of many different countries, such as Iran.

Social media for disaster management: the Sri Lankan context

Impacts of disasters were expeditious in the last decade due to the insufficiency of existing traditional Disaster Management (DM) practices. Though the social media discovered as a vital tool to enhance DM all over the world, dearth of literature found for the context of Sri Lanka. Therefore, this research focuses on identifying the use of social media for the DM in the context of Sri Lanka and to increase the support given to the possible victims, related to DM through the adoption of social media. A comprehensive literature review has been carried out to investigate the concept of social media and its relationship with DM. Case study research strategy has been used for the data collection on identifying the benefits and limitations on usage of social media for DM in the Sri Lankan context. Collected data analysed using content analysis. Findings of the study revealed, early warning as the most common benefit of using social media for DM in the Sri Lankan context. It was also identified from this study that, there are limitations related to quality of information, public commitment towards social media and financial barriers, which hinder the application of social media in Sri Lanka.

Stayhome Hashtag: Sentiment Analysis on Twitter During the Covid-19 Pandemic

With developing technology today, social media has entered every area of our lives. Many people come together and share in social media platforms without time and space restrictions. Social media has been in our lives so much lately. It is an undeniable fact that global outbreaks, which constitute an important part of our lives, are also affected by these networks and that they exist in these networks and share the users. The purpose of making this hashtag analysis is to reveal the difference in discourse and language while analyzing twitter data, while doing this, to evaluate the effects of a global epidemic crisis on language, message and crisis management with social media data. Sentiment analysis of tweets, on the other hand, objectives to take a look at the contents of these messages, to degree the feelings and feelings conveyed. This form of analysis is typically completed through amassing textual content data, then investigating the “sentiment” conveyed. Within the scope of our study, one hundred thousand twitter messages posted with the #stayhome hashtag between 23 May 2020 and 29 May 2020 were examined. The impact and reliability of social media in disaster management could be questioned by carrying out a content analysis based totally on the semantic analysis of the messages given on the Twitter posts with the phrases and frequencies used. Social media and Twitter content are increasingly more identified as treasured resources of public health signals concerning use in ailment surveillance and health disaster management.

Social Media and Alternative Discourse on Natural Hazard: A Case Study of Facebook Group ‘Info Merapi’

Existing research on social media in disaster management usually focus on the role of social media in the emergency management. While the roles of social media in the normal times are rarely examined. This study discusses the content of Facebook group ‘Info Merapi’, which is dedicated to disaster risk reduction, especially in the context of Mount Merapi periodic eruptions. The materials of this research are the content of the group over two months periods during the normal times of Mt. Merapi volcanic activities, namely 10 July to 10 August 2016 and 20 August to 20 September 2019. The material was analysed with critical discourse analysis approach. In addition, this study has also interviewed the admin of the group. This study concludes that in the disaster-prone areas social media have important roles in communicating risk and maintaining the preparedness of local people to the future hazards. This study also concludes that Info Merapi represents the traditional beliefs of local people to live in harmony, both in harmony with the nature and in harmony with the spirits of Merapi. The group also represents the discourse of ‘beautiful Merapi’, which is in sharp contrast to the discourse of ‘dangerous Merapi’ as commonly displayed by the Indonesian mainstream media. Info Merapi proposes the local peoples’ perspective, focusing on the long normal periods, rather than emphasizing the short eruption periods. Finally, Info Merapi also shows the dominance of modern state-sponsored knowledge about Mt. Merapi and its eruption among local residents on the slopes of Mt. Merapi. Keywords: Social media, Info Merapi, alternative discourse, Merapi eruption, living in harmony.

Role of Social Media in Disaster Management in Bangladesh Towards the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Review and Directions

Role of Social Media in Disaster Management in Bangladesh Towards the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Review and Directions

Social Media for Disaster Management: Operational Value of the Social Conversation

Disaster relief organizations increasingly engage in social conversations to inform social media users about activities such as evacuation routes and aid distribution. Concurrently, users share information such as the demand for aid, willingness to donate and availability to volunteer through social conversations with relief organizations. We investigate the effect of this information exchange on social engagement during disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. We propose that the effect of information on social engagement increases from preparedness to response and decreases from response to recovery. Some of the information exchanged in social conversations is actionable as well. We propose, however, that the effect of actionable information reaches its lowest point during disaster response. To test our theory, we use Facebook data from five benchmark organizations that responded to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We analyze all of the organizations’ posts and users’ comments during a three‐week period before, during and after Hurricane Sandy. Our findings support our theory. Furthermore, we identify an opportunity for relief organizations to improve their use of social media for disaster management. While relief organizations focus on informing disaster victims about aid distribution, most users are asking about how they as individuals can donate or volunteer. Thus, besides posting information directed to victims, organizations should post more information targeting potential donors and volunteers.

Participation Patterns and Reliability of Human Sensing in Crowd-Sourced Disaster Management

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant increase in crowd-sourcing applications for disaster management. Their success depends heavily on the behaviour of social media users, acting as human sensors during disaster monitoring and emergency response. Unlike their technological counterparts, human sensors are complex social entities, contributing in different ways to their collective task and creating varying participation patterns through social media. Failing to understand these participation patterns limits our capacity to evaluate the reliability of human sensing in different contexts. Based on an analysis of flood-related information contributed by Twitter users in Jakarta during the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 monsoonal seasons, this study establishes four categories of human sensors and their respective levels of reliability for disaster management. The results have significant implications for how we frame expectations and develop reliance on the use of social media for disaster management. Importantly, the results will serve as a useful guide for understanding levels of incentive that may be required to motivate members of the different categories of social media users during emergencies and disasters.

The analysis technique of social media for disaster management

The analysis technique of social media for disaster management

Use of Social Media for Disaster Management

Social media is emerging as an important information-based communication tool for disaster management. Yet there are many relief organizations that are not able to develop strategies and allocate resources to effectively use social media for disaster management. The reason behind this inability may be a lack of understanding regarding the different functionalities of social media. In this paper, we examine the literature using content analysis to understand the current usage of social media in disaster management. We draw on the honeycomb framework and the results of our content analysis to suggest a new framework that can help in utilizing social media more effectively during the different phases of disaster management. We also discuss the implications of our study.