Social media usage patterns during natural hazards

RESEARCH ARTICLE Social media usage patterns during natural hazards Meredith T. Niles ID1,2*, Benjamin F. Emery3, Andrew J. Reagan ID4, Peter Sheridan Dodds3, Christopher M. Danforth3 1 Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America, 2 Food Systems Program, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America, 3 Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America, 4 MassMutual Data Science, Amherst, MA, United States of America a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Niles MT, Emery BF, Reagan AJ, Dodds PS, Danforth CM (2019) Social media usage patterns during natural hazards. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0210484. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0210484 Editor: Sergi Lozano, Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), SPAIN Received: June 19, 2018 Accepted: December 25, 2018 Published: February 13, 2019 Copyright: © 2019 Niles et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All the data and coding files are available from GitHub at this link: https://github.com/dbemerydt/food-securitytweets. Funding: This study was supported by USDA HATCH grant number VT-H02303 to MTN. AR receives support in the form of salary from the commercial company, Mass Mutual (https://www. massmutual.com/). AR’s employment with Mass Mutual began after the research for this study had been completed. Mass Mutual had no role in study * Abstract Natural hazards are becoming increasingly expensive as climate change and development are exposing communities to greater risks. Preparation and recovery are critical for climate change resilience, and social media are being used more and more to communicate before, during, and after disasters. While there is a growing body of research aimed at understanding how people use social media surrounding disaster events, most existing work has focused on a single disaster case study. In the present study, we analyze five of the costliest disasters in the last decade in the United States (Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, two sets of tornado outbreaks, and flooding in Louisiana) through the lens of Twitter. In particular, we explore the frequency of both generic and specific food-security related terms, and quantify the relationship between network size and Twitter activity during disasters. We find differences in tweet volume for keywords depending on disaster type, with people using Twitter more frequently in preparation for Hurricanes, and for real-time or recovery information for tornado and flooding events. Further, we find that people share a host of general disaster and specific preparation and recovery terms during these events. Finally, we find that among all account types, individuals with “average” sized networks are most likely to share information during these disasters, and in most cases, do so more frequently than normal. This suggests that around disasters, an ideal form of social contagion is being engaged in which average people rather than outsized influentials are key to communication. These results provide important context for the type of disaster information and target audiences that may be most useful for disaster communication during varying extreme events. 1. Introduction 1.1 Background As of 2017, it is estimated that 77% of Americans own and use smartphones [1]. The adoption of this technology has given unprecedented and immediate access to people for rapidly PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210484 February 13, 2019 1 / 16 Social media usage patterns during natural hazards design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of this author are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. Competing interests: The authors declare the following interests: MTN is a member of the board of directors of The Public Library of Science (PLOS). This role has in no way influenced the outcome or development of this work or the peerreview process. After the research for this paper was completed, AR became employed by the commercial company, Mass Mutual (https://www. massmutual.com/). This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. consuming and producing information. Commensurate with the rise in mobile communication has been a corresponding increase in the use of social media as a tool for sharing news and networking. Eighty percent of social media use occurs via mobile technologies, and 24% of Americans, roughly 68 million people, use Twitter [2]. Indeed, social media is increasingly changing the way society communicates before, during and after disaster events [3,4]. As the cost of disasters in the United States and globally continues to increase [5], and future climate projections indicate that extreme events will likely become more frequent and severe, disaster preparation and recovery via communication has become a critical point of study for climate change adaptation [6]. The use of social media for disaster communication dates at least to the Haitian earthquake of 2010, during which social media kept people around the world informed [7]. Evidence also suggests that the Haitian earthquake catalyzed new mechanisms of communicating about disasters, including information dissemination and crowd funding via social media [8,9]. Since then, there has been a growing and very recent focus, both applied and academic, in understanding how social media is used during times of disasters and the ways that it may be leveraged for disaster preparedness and improving responses [10]. Social media is now used by a variety of parties during disaster events including communities, governments, individuals, organizations, and media outlets, and for more than a dozen distinct purposes of communication [11]. 1.2 Existing research Existing research on social media and disasters has taken multiple approaches ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative. A small body of research has explored who retweets disaster information, what they retweet and why [12]. Existing evidence indicates that people may be tweeting more frequently leading up to, during and after disaster events, and that most people are using social media via a smartphone, which enables delivery of other disaster information such as text message alerts [13]. Others have found that Twitter user typologies exist. Stakeholders use tweets to communicate in different ways, albeit the majority of which are dissemination of second-hand information, coordination of relief efforts, and memorialization of those affected [14]. Some have focused on the ethica (...truncated)