Social media platforms provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as disasters caused by natural hazards. As a result, first responders, decision makers, and the public can use this information to gain insight into the situation as it unfolds. In particular, many social media messages communicated during emergencies convey timely, actionable information. Processing social media messages to obtain such information, however, involves solving multiple challenges including: parsing brief and informal messages, handling information overload, and prioritizing different types of information found in messages. These challenges can be mapped to classical information processing operations such as filtering, classifying, ranking, aggregating, extracting, and summarizing. We survey the state of the art regarding computational methods to process social media messages and highlight both their contributions and shortcomings. In addition, we examine their particularities, and methodically examine a series of key subproblems ranging from the detection of events to the creation of actionable and useful summaries. Research thus far has, to a large extent, produced methods to extract situational awareness information from social media. In this survey, we cover these various approaches, and highlight their benefits and shortcomings. We conclude with research challenges that go beyond situational awareness, and begin to look at supporting decision making and coordinating emergency-response actions.

/pdf/processing-social-media-messages-in-mass-emergency-a-survey-2wkyj3y36n.pdf

Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency: A Survey

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0149206316680030

Crises and Crisis Management: Integration, Interpretation, and Research Development:

Background: The recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is taking a toll on the world’s health care infrastructure as well as the social, economic, and psychological well-being of humanity. Individuals, organizations, and governments are using social media to communicate with each other on a number of issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not much is known about the topics being shared on social media platforms relating to COVID-19. Analyzing such information can help policy makers and health care organizations assess the needs of their stakeholders and address them appropriately.
Objective: This study aims to identify the main topics posted by Twitter users related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: Leveraging a set of tools (Twitter’s search application programming interface (API), Tweepy Python library, and PostgreSQL database) and using a set of predefined search terms (“corona,” “2019-nCov,” and “COVID-19”), we extracted the text and metadata (number of likes and retweets, and user profile information including the number of followers) of public English language tweets from February 2, 2020, to March 15, 2020. We analyzed the collected tweets using word frequencies of single (unigrams) and double words (bigrams). We leveraged latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling to identify topics discussed in the tweets. We also performed sentiment analysis and extracted the mean number of retweets, likes, and followers for each topic and calculated the interaction rate per topic.
Results: Out of approximately 2.8 million tweets included, 167,073 unique tweets from 160,829 unique users met the inclusion criteria. Our analysis identified 12 topics, which were grouped into four main themes: origin of the virus; its sources; its impact on people, countries, and the economy; and ways of mitigating the risk of infection. The mean sentiment was positive for 10 topics and negative for 2 topics (deaths caused by COVID-19 and increased racism). The mean for tweet topics of account followers ranged from 2722 (increased racism) to 13,413 (economic losses). The highest mean of likes for the tweets was 15.4 (economic loss), while the lowest was 3.94 (travel bans and warnings).
Conclusions: Public health crisis response activities on the ground and online are becoming increasingly simultaneous and intertwined. Social media provides an opportunity to directly communicate health information to the public. Health systems should work on building national and international disease detection and surveillance systems through monitoring social media. There is also a need for a more proactive and agile public health presence on social media to combat the spread of fake news.

Top Concerns of Tweeters During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infoveillance Study.

Media is full of false claims. Even Oxford Dictionaries named "post-truth" as the word of 2016. This makes it more important than ever to build systems that can identify the veracity of a story, and the kind of discourse there is around it. RumourEval is a SemEval shared task that aims to identify and handle rumours and reactions to them, in text. We present an annotation scheme, a large dataset covering multiple topics - each having their own families of claims and replies - and use these to pose two concrete challenges as well as the results achieved by participants on these challenges.

/pdf/semeval-2017-task-8-rumoureval-determining-rumour-veracity-1e309wtlr2.pdf

SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours

Social media has been established in many larger emergencies and crises. This process has not started just a few years ago, but already 15 years ago in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the following years, especially in the last 10, sometimes summarized under the term crisis informatics, a variety of studies focusing on the use of ICT and social media before, during or after nearly every crisis and emergency has arisen. This article aims to recapitulate 15 years of social media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be found across different cases in order to point out what has been achieved so far, and what future potentials exist.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-5973.12196

Fifteen years of social media in emergencies: A retrospective review and future directions for crisis Informatics

This work-in-process literature review gives an overview of recent insight in the incorporation of social media in risk and crisis communication By marrying literature and examples of social media use with best practices in risk and crisis communication, this study demonstrates how communicators can embrace social media tools to better manage a risk or crisis Best practices in risk and crisis communication are summarized, examples of social media tools used to manage risks and crises are expounded, and recommendations for practitioners are provided to incorporate social media tools in risk and crisis communication

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/j_1468-5973_2011_00639_x_wml.pdf?abstractid=1840231&mirid=1&type=2

A Work‐In‐Process Literature Review: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

Increasing Dialogue in Disasters: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

The user-generated content trend extends beyond the blogosphere and into the arenas of visual c0l11111unication-particularly that of typography. Researchers have little knowledge about the ilnplicatiol1s of this typography booln, although young people today have been exposed to the user-generated trend for well over a decade. This study discerns groups of college students based on their opinions about both trendy user-generated typefaces and classic typefaces in college textbooks. Q rnethodology is used to collect and analyze data about typeface preference. This 111ethodo!ogy is especially suited to preIinl;naly research lIsed to obtain a deeper understanding abollt under-explored concepts like aesthetic typographic preference. The researcher identified four distinct groups of college students based lIpon individual subjective preferencesfor classic or trendy t;ypefaces.

Tara Buehner

Papers

A Work‐In‐Process Literature Review: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

Increasing Dialogue in Disasters: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

College Student Preferences for Trendy versus Classic Typefaces