Understanding Community Collective Behaviour Through Social Media Responses: Case of Sunda Strait Tsunami, 2018, Indonesia

Abstract

The Sunda Strait Tsunami which occurred on 22nd December 2018 is one among too many examples of a rapid on-set disaster that attracted public attention through Twitter. This sudden event had a massive impact on parts of the west coast of Banten Province, Indonesia. Therefore, this research aimed to evaluate the collective response reflected on Twitter due to the 2018 Sunda Strait Tsunami. Previous studies shows the utilization of crowd sourcing data from social media for community capacity and quick assessment of disaster impacts. Therefore, the characteristics of people’s responses on social media based on spatio-temporal attributes needs to be understood first to build better understanding about the information that can be used for emergency response strategies consideration. This research method involved a spatial statistics approach, while data collection and descriptive analysis were carried out based on Twitter word cloud data. This analysis showed that temporally, the highest number of tweets was generated at the beginning of the disaster period with downward trend into the end of phase. As for spatially, people in directly affected areas by the disaster tend to give negative sentiments as their expression of sadness and fears towards the disaster. The content of the tweets involved asking for help, reporting on the current situation, and confirming the news on accounts belonging to government agencies. Furthermore, people in areas that were not directly affected produced tweets with more positive sentiment with expressions of condolences, sympathy, gratitude and invitations for volunteers and social actions.