Improving social media use for disaster resilience: challenges and strategies

Abstract

This paper develops a social media-disaster resilience analysis framework by categorizing types of social media use and their challenges to better understand and assess its role in disaster resilience research and management. The framework is derived primarily from several case studies of Twitter use in three hurricane events in the United States – Hurricanes Isaac, Sandy, and Harvey. The paper first outlines four major contributions of social media data for disaster resilience research and management, which include serving as an effective communication platform, providing ground truth information for emergency response and rescue operations, providing information on people’s sentiments, and allowing predictive modeling. However, there are four key challenges to its uses, which include easy spreading of false information, social and geographical disparities of Twitter use, technical issues on processing and analyzing big and noisy data, especially on improving the locational accuracy of the tweets, and algorithm bias in AI and other types of modeling. Then, the paper proposes twenty strategies that the four sectors of the social media community – organizations, individuals, social media companies, and researchers – could take to improve social media use to increase disaster resilience.

Keywords

• twitter use challenges and strategies
• disaster resilience
• social and geographical disparities
• emergency rescue
• hurricane isaac
• hurricane sandy
• hurricane harvey