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Social Media in Disaster Management

Roman Fekolkin fekolkins@gmail.com

Trends in IS and Information Security, Luleå University of Technology

Abstract – Provision of an accurate and timely disaster

relief effort requires an insightful informational

coverage of a crisis situation. Social media has a

potential of providing a large amount of information

generated by people about different aspects of a certain

crisis situation. However, emergency-oriented social

media utilization is still at an embryonic stage of its

understanding. So, in this report 10 research studies

were reviewed in an attempt to gain some understanding

about this approach. As it appeared, crowdsourced

information allows to get a versatile and insightful

understanding of a crisis situation, but, as with any Big

Data, there are major challenges of making use of high

volumes of diverse information, in terms of extraction

and representation of relevant and accurate

information. Furthermore, other research studies

proposed extraction/representation techniques which

were primarily aimed at thematic and geographical

clustering of information. As it appeared from the real

cases of social media application during emergencies,

there is still no standardized approach on how such

information can be handled, but in those cases,

emergency responders still managed to successfully

apply their own methods of primarily geographical and

thematic clustering of information, while still being

greatly challenged by overwhelming amount of user-

generated information. Thus, the success could perhaps

be explained by social media being used primarily as a

complement/enhancement of other already proved to be

effective techniques. Further exploration would be

needed in order to gain a more complete understanding

of the current state emergency-oriented social media

utilization, which could later be used as a theoretical

framework for a new research study in this area.

Index Terms – Big Data, content filtering, disaster

management, information extraction, social media

INTRODUCTION

Social media nowadays has become a widely used

communicational medium and generally essential

component of many people’s lives. Social media offer a

range of possibilities to many people when it comes to not

only consumption, but also creation of content, establishing

convenient opportunities for socialization (Yates &

Paquette, 2011; Yin, Lampert, Cameron, Robinson, &

Power, 2012). However, social media can be used for more

than just communication and sharing information between

acquaintances. Users of social networks directly or

indirectly share their opinions, experiences and interests

about different things and events, the information about

which from the perspective of those users can be very useful

for various organizations, including the ones that deal with

disaster relief efforts, when it comes to making appropriate

decisions in an objective, contextually accurate and

productive manner (Yates & Paquette, 2011; Kavanaugh,

Fox, Sheetz, Yang, Li, Shoemaker & Xie, 2012; Lohr,

2012).

In particular, Big Data obtained from social

networks can be used for such serious purposes as raising

social awareness among a large group of individuals on a

national or even international level about various

phenomenon and different world events, such as natural or

human-inflicted disasters (Yin, Lampert, Cameron,

Robinson, & Power, 2012; Imran, Elbassuoni, Castillo, Diaz

& Meier, 2013) and thereby provide continuous support for

a more productive and accurate disaster response (Ehnis &

Bunker, 2012; McClendon & Robinson, 2013). Accuracy of

a disaster response can be a particularly challenging thing to

achieve, because in case of disasters, usefulness of such

response depends on actual understanding of dynamically

changing contextual conditions of an affected environment

(Yates & Paquette, 2011; Ehnis & Bunker, 2012). That is

why, considering potential usefulness of user-generated

content/knowledge for gaining a versatile or, in other words,

multi-perspectival understanding of a particular emergency

situation and taking into account unacceptability of wasting

time and resources in vain when people’s lives are at stake,

there is a need to properly understand how to extract

relevant content and put it to good use.

I. Social Media and Big Data

In order for Big Data, generated by social networks, to make

sense and facilitate its accurate usage in problem-solving

processes without making conclusion based on misleading

findings with potentially disastrous consequences, it would

have to be analysed accurately. However, extraction and

structurally understandable representation of tremendous

amounts of non-homogeneous data collected from social

networks is far from being a trivial task, making it

absolutely essential to apply highly sophisticated

technological solutions and qualified experts in order to

analyse and actually make practical use of all that data

(Lohr, 2012; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). The

importance of extraction of relevant information and its

analysis was raised in numerous research studies (Yin,

Lampert, Cameron, Robinson, & Power, 2012; Imran,

Elbassuoni, Castillo, Diaz & Meier, 2013; Middleton,

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Middleton & Modafferi, 2014), where the authors proposed

various techniques; including geographical clustering and

topic-based filtering of user entries, some of which are

discussed later in this paper. In general, depending on the

context, by making sense of such large and complex data

sets and converting them into knowledge, there would be a

possibility not only to make predictions about potentially

beneficial business moves, but also get a valuable insight

into a certain situation and even make potentially life-saving

decisions, when it comes to using social media-originated

Big Data analysis for emergency management (Tene &

Polonetsky, 2012; Cavoukian & Jonas, 2012).

However, analysis of Big Data is, in its turn,

challenged by technological, intellectual and thereby

financial resources that would have to be invested into it,

which might simply be unfeasible to handle for many

organizations. Therefore, when it comes to making sense of

data retrieved from social networks for disaster

management, government agencies should be involved, not

only because it would be feasible or realistic for them to

invest the necessary financial and intellectual resources, but

also because it should be their responsibility to ensure safety

of their citizens during emergencies (Yates & Paquette,

2011; Kawtrakul, Mulasastra, Chanlekha, Rajbhandari,

Prathumchai, Nagai & Khunthong, 2012).

II. Purpose of this paper

Usage of social media has been rapidly gaining recognition

as a powerful tool for emergency management, but its

capabilities, just as with any new technology trend, are not

yet fully explored, which is understandable because

maturity of approaches evolves over time. So, the purpose

of this paper was to analyse research studies in the field of

social media application in emergency management. This

was done in order to get an insight about how this rapidly

growing in popularity technique has been used by

emergency agencies for the last several years, exploring its

benefits and challenges, and how those challenges were

dealt with. To be more precise, this paper sought to provide

answers to the following questions:

What advantages and challenges arise from usage

of social media in emergency management?

What types of approaches can be used for

extraction/representation of relevant information

from user-generated content on social networks?

How is social media used in emergency

management in real emergency situations?

METHODOLOGY

As it was stated by Denscombe (2014), a document study

could be useful for getting acquainted with relevant research

studies conducted by others and then using that theoretical

framework for designing a full-scale research and assist

researchers in interpretation of their findings. So, in this

study, a document study in a form of a literature review was

employed and even though this paper was merely about

studying relevant literature about the chosen topic, the

constructed theoretical framework could still be used for

designing a full-scale research study about social media

application in emergency management and interpreting its

findings.

Furthermore, in this paper, the research studies

were reviewed in such a way that would build a coherent

and logical discussion of the main arguments that the

authors have attempted to communicate to the reader. So, in

this report, relevant papers were analysed and their main

points were extracted into a coherent summary. By being

relevant, it is implied that the reviewed papers were related

to the field of emergency-oriented social media utilization.

Through the literature review, this paper presents not only

potential challenges that can arise from using social media

during disaster events, but also the ways how those

challenges can be dealt with.

The requirements for this assignment stated that the

analysis had to include 8 to 10 relevant research studies.

That’s exactly have been done. Furthermore, as it has been

stated in one of the research studies (Yates and Paquette,

2011) that was published in 2011, at that period of time

there were no previous research studies that explored social

media utilization by emergency agencies, which was

actually the primary interest of this particular report.

Therefore, the year 2011 was used as the earliest publication

date a paper could have in order to be chosen for analysis.

The literature review section was divided into three

sub-sections, with each one being dedicated different

aspects of social media usage in emergency management.

So, the first sub-section is dedicated to discussion of

benefits and challenges with emergency-oriented social

media utilization. The second sub-section discusses some of

the approaches that were proposed by other research studies

that were aimed to deal with some of those challenges.

Finally, the last sub-section presents a discussion of some of

the real case examples of how social media was used in

crisis situations. To maintain the balance between the sub-

sections, each of them presented a discussion of three

research studies relevant to their respective theme/aspect

that they had to cover. In the following table 1 there is an

overview of the number of papers that were discussed in

each sub-section.

TABLE I TOTAL NUMBER OF PAPERS REVIEWED IN EACH SUB-SECTION

Topic Number of papers

Introduction to Literature

review 1

Benefits and challenges with

usage of social media in

disaster management 3

Approaches for extraction and

representation of information 3

Examples of real cases of social

media application during

emergencies 3

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Each sub-section was concluded with a table that

summarized the main points of the reviewed research

papers, either they the identified challenges/benefits of

social media or types of methods used for

extraction/representation of information.

To search for relevant research papers for analysis,

Google Scholar was used. The main search criterion,

besides the aforementioned year of publication, was its

relation to usage of social media in emergency management.

LITERATURE REVIEW

As it was mentioned previously, it would take time before

effective ways of social media application during

emergencies could be fully understood. So, the authors of

one of the not so recent research studies (Merchant, Elmer

& Lurie, 2011), which was actually published when usage

of social media for emergency management was still a “new

thing” and this concept was still at an embryonic stage of its

development with very few explorative research studies

being published at that time, and associatively limitations of

that approach were not yet properly understood. So, the

authors gave somewhat predictive but, as it turned out from

the upcoming discussion, reasonable statements that

crowdsourced information collected from social networks

could serve as a valuable knowledge base for supporting

emergency agencies in designing contextually more

accurate and generally relevant plans for

preparation/prevention, response and recovery with a greater

community involvement and thereby greater response

network, all of which could at the very least minimize risks

of uncontrollably catastrophic development of crisis events.

However, the authors were not blinded by potential power

of social media in emergency management, but rather they

were realistic about challenges that would have to be faced

before social media could realize its potential in such

serious area of application. Namely, the authors have

importantly pointed out the issue with inaccurate or even

deliberately falsified information posted by users on social

networks, which could potentially mislead decision-making

processes, which in case of crisis situations could have

severe consequences, when people in need might simply be

deprived of relevant or any assistance/aid at all. Thus,

understandably, in order to avoid taking risks with full

reliance on social media during emergencies, it was

suggested by the authors that it would preferably have to be

employed in a strategically aligned combination with

traditional (more common) approaches used by a particular

emergency agency for their enhancement, due to social

media being unable, at that time, to serve as a superior or

even an equally effective standalone alternative to those

already tested approaches.

So, even though, at the time the aforementioned

research study was published there were still significant

gaps in knowledge about social media application for

emergency management, the authors still managed to give a

comprehensive overview of this approach, realistically

discussing not only its potential benefits, but also

emphasizing its indisputably critical shortcomings, which

would undoubtedly have to be accounted for when putting

such approach to use. The arguments presented by that

study were later discussed in other research studies that

aimed to present scientifically valuable arguments based on

extensive studies of real cases and actual experiments with

practical application of such approach.

III. Benefits and challenges with usage of social media

in disaster management

One of the relatively early research studies (Gao, Barbier &

Goolsby, 2011) presented enlightening arguments about

benefits and challenges with usage of social media’s

crowdsourced information for disaster relief efforts. The

authors did state that production of information on social

networks is based on its participatory creation by a variety

of different individuals with different opinions and

experiences, which makes that information highly versatile

and thereby particularly valuable for making accurate

emergency management planning. However, according to

the authors, this was not the main advantage of social

media. They looked at social media usefulness from the

perspective of its more specific capabilities that could bring

solid benefits to those who utilizes them for emergency

management. So, they interestingly outlined that users on

social networks tend to respond almost immediately to

emergencies, by posting information about those

emergencies on social networks. That information could in

its turn be used by emergency agencies for getting a timely

insight into a particular situation. This timely information

acquisition is indeed critical especially because in those

situations the lack of timeliness could result in unacceptably

severe and life-threatening consequences. Another benefit

that was emphasized by the authors was that information

posted by users on social networks could be categorized by

their tags, which could help emergency agencies to more

easily identify the most important issues and address their

resolution. Information contained in users’ entries could

even be categorized by geo-tags. Such geographical

mapping was argued to be capable of providing emergency

agencies with a possibility to more effectively locate

requests for help and get a generally more comprehensive

understanding of emergency’s big picture. Understandably,

there are certain shortcomings with analysis of large

amounts of highly variant information, just as with any Big

Data. Those shortcomings and their role in prevention of

social media from becoming a productive tool for

emergency management were carefully discussed by the

authors of that paper. Some of the emphasized shortcomings

included potential inaccuracy or insufficiency of

information posted by users on social networks information

during emergencies for emergency agencies to be able to

use it for emergency management or, even worse, use it

with contextually relevant precision. No surprise was the

fact that users’ entries might not necessarily have geo-tags

assigned to them or duplicate entries with the same geo-tags

could exist greatly distorting real distribution of emergency

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“reports”, all of which would practically render the idea of

geographical mapping of crowdsourced information

infeasible. Naturally, one would think how to tame power of

social media and make it beneficial. Therefore, the authors

understandably stated that in order for crowdsourced

information to be usefully applied in emergency

management, there would be a need for it to be properly

processed and analysed by mechanisms for verification of

its relevance and accuracy, with a follow-up categorization

and visual representation, making it readily-available for

exploitation by emergency agencies. The authors’

arguments are very relevant, because accuracy and time-

efficiency are absolutely essential in emergency

management.

There was a more recent research study

(Alexander, 2014), which, regardless of the almost three

year difference in the time of publication, presented a lot of

similar arguments about benefits and shortfalls of

emergency-oriented social media utilization as the ones

presented by the authors of the aforementioned paper.

Namely, the author also outlined the fact that collaboratively

created and thereby versatile information collected from

social networks could allow emergency agencies to act

proactively for crisis risk reduction and reactively for

responding to crisis events, having contextual characteristics

properly understood and regular people’s opinions

accounted for when making decisions about how to assist

them during crises. Furthermore, the author even pointed

out an important but, at the same time, somewhat obvious

fact that usage of collaboratively created information for

emergency management would make those people

contributors to emergency management, making it socially

inclusive. Interestingly, what has not been mentioned in the

previous research study is the fact that public availability of

information broadcasted on social networks could be used

for attracting people’s attention and boosting fundraising,

for example, for assisting people with emergency recovery.

However, just like in the aforementioned study by Gao et al.

(2011), the author here did not explicitly mention social

media being useful for recovery from those events, which

was actually emphasized by the previously discussed

Merchant et al. (2011). On the other hand, recovery phase of

emergency management could perhaps be considered as one

of the components of risk reduction phase, where dealing

with consequences of a crisis would include taking

measures for prevention of those factors from failing to

maintain stability again during next crisis events. As for the

challenges with social media application for emergency

management, they author’s arguments were pretty aligned

with the ones presented by the aforementioned Gao et al.

Namely, the author unsurprisingly pointed out dangers of

inaccurate or deliberately falsified and thereby misleading

information posted by users on social networks, which

would not only make it useless but even dangerous when

people’s lives are at stake. So, expectedly, another noted

challenge was people perceiving information generated by

other people on social networks being less trustworthy than

information provided by official media outlets and

authorities. The author’s arguments about social media

being potentially misused by “bad guys” for carrying out

their sinister plans and causing crisis situations are not

exactly related to challenges with using social media in

emergency management, but rather it’s a general threat that

can emerge from social media, which could however be

accounted for when designing a contingency planning. The

absolutely essential downside of social media that was

unacceptably overlooked by the previous research study was

the fact that without electricity and the Internet people

would simply be unable to use technology for accessing

social media, considering that there is no guarantee that

availability of those aspects would be maintained during

disaster events. This problem could indeed prevent people

from submitting critical information and associatively

emergency agencies would be unable to provide necessary

assistance, which supports the arguments of that same paper

by Gao et al. about importance of using social media in

strategically aligned combination with traditional methods

used by a particular emergency agency. Last but not least, it

is worth to note that the three year difference in publication

date between this research and the previously discussed one

presented by Gao et al. did not change the fact that, the

author here still pointed out the existing lack of sufficient

number of research studies in this important field of

research. This is a particularly interesting fact considering

that both authors explicitly emphasized the rapidly growing

interest in emergency-oriented social media utilization,

which raises a question about why this interest did not

trigger a more active research of this field that would help to

facilitate its greater understanding.

Advantages and challenges with social media

utilization in emergency management have also been

discussed in one of the recently published research studies

(Anikeeva, Steenkamp & Arbon, 2015), which was largely

aligned with the arguments of the previous two research

studies. Namely, the authors pointed out that, when it comes

to accessing emergency-related information during disaster

events, the increasing popularity of social media has

resulted in people’s preference for informationally

diversified and socially inclusive social media rather than

traditional but somewhat one-sided means of information

sources (e.g. TV, radio, telephone). At the same time, just as

it was also argued by the aforementioned Alexander (2014),

people might be hesitant to trust information posted by other

users on social networks. However, unlike Alexander, the

authors here have suggested that official media outlets and

emergency agencies should keep up with current trends and

establish continuous social media presence, by allocating

financial and properly trained human resources for

maintaining sustainability and productiveness of that

presence as part of a sound strategy. Their arguments are

understandable and more than relevant, because considering

amount of circulated on social networks information,

significant amount of which might be speculative and

inaccurate, it could dangerously distort people’s

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understanding of an emergency situation, unless reliable

sources of verified information are to be found on

conveniently accessible social media. Furthermore, similarly

to Alexander, this research study also outlined dependency

between people’s ability to access social media and such

factors as quality of network coverage and accessibility of

electricity, which might be very poor in remote areas or

severely damaged respectively. This could indeed leave out

people in certain regions unaccounted for when planning

emergency relief efforts and thereby lead to a life-

threatening delay in aid provision. Last but not least, the

authors outlined the fact that, unlike regular websites

employed by emergency organizations, social media

platforms tend to be capable of handling much higher

volumes of traffic. Inability to communicate or obtain

information from affected regions on time could endanger

many people’s lives, because as it was previously discussed

by Gao et al. (2011), timeliness is absolutely critical in fast

changing situations. That is why, once again supporting the

arguments of that same Gao et al it is important to carefully

consider both advantages and shortfalls of social media and

other emergency management techniques, combining them

in a strategically aligned and mutually strengthening

manner, making emergency management strategy with as

few potential weak spots as possible.

a. Overview of challenges and advantages of

social media in disaster management

In general, the reviewed research studies in this section

agreed on some absolutely essential benefits (e.g.

information versatility/availability). However, the authors

also agreed on the fact that while one of the major

advantages of information posted by users on social

networks being its diversity, there is a great challenge with

extraction of information that is actually relevant and

accurate. In the table 2 below, there is a summary of

advantages with using social media in emergency

management that were discussed in this section of the

literature review. TABLE II

SUMMARY OF ADVANTAGES WITH USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN EMERGENCY

MANAGEMENT

Advantages Papers mentioning them

Tag-based categorization of

information about crisis

events

Gao, Barbier & Goolsby,

2011; Alexander, 2014

Geographical clustering of

information about crisis

events

Gao, Barbier & Goolsby,

2011; Alexander, 2014

Immediate generation of

information about crisis

events

Gao, Barbier & Goolsby,

2011; Alexander, 2014

Making emergency

management socially

Alexander, 2014;

Anikeeva, Steenkamp &

inclusive (people have a say

in it)

Arbon, 2015

Versatility of collaboratively

created information

Gao, Barbier & Goolsby,

2011; Alexander, 2014;

Anikeeva, Steenkamp &

Arbon, 2015

Public availability of

information => raising

awareness about crises among

people

Gao, Barbier & Goolsby,

2011; Alexander, 2014;

Anikeeva, Steenkamp &

Arbon, 2015

Social networks being more

robust and prone to failure

during periods of high traffic

Anikeeva, Steenkamp &

Arbon, 2015

Attracting public attention for

launching appeals for

donations

Alexander, 2014

In the table 3 below, there is a summary of shortfall or

challenges with using social media in emergency

management that were discussed in this section.

TABLE III

SUMMARY OF SHORTFALLS WITH USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN EMERGENCY

MANAGEMENT

Shortfalls Papers mentioning

them

Lack of mechanisms for using

social media in

coordinated/synchronized manner

by multiple emergency agencies

Gao, Barbier &

Goolsby, 2011

Inaccurate, falsified or irrelevant

information

Gao, Barbier &

Goolsby, 2011;

Alexander, 2014;

Anikeeva, Steenkamp

& Arbon, 2015

Public availability of information

=> potential endangerment of

those involved in emergency

management on location.

Gao, Barbier &

Goolsby, 2011

Access to social networks is

dependent on availability of

electricity and the Internet in

particular

Alexander, 2014;

Anikeeva, Steenkamp

& Arbon, 2015

Weak social media presence of

trustworthy emergency agencies

and official media outlets =>

information on social networks

being untrustworthy

Anikeeva, Steenkamp

& Arbon, 2015

Disinformation on social

networks being legally

punishable => no one to be held

responsible for deliberate

disinformation

Anikeeva, Steenkamp

& Arbon, 2015

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IV. Approaches for extraction and representation of

information

Practically all of the previously discussed research studies

have pointed out challenges with extraction of relevant and

accurate information from social media. There were,

however, several research studies that have proposed

peculiar and claimed to be effective approaches on how

emergency agencies could filter out masses of large chunks

of useless and potentially misleading information and rather

focus on information that can actually be used for

facilitation of decision making processes with contextual

relevance to a particular case.

An interesting approach was proposed in a not so recent

research study (Yin, Lampert, Cameron, Robinson, &

Power, 2012), where the issue with overwhelming number

of relevant and irrelevant user entries on social networks,

specifically Twitter as a widely popular information

broadcasting platform, could drastically decrease usefulness

of such information for its inclusion in highly sensitive

decision-making processes performed by emergency

agencies. So, the authors proposed a Twitter-based

emergency detection system, that would extract and

visualise information in real-time, making it readily

available for emergency agencies to make timely decisions

about appropriate disaster relief efforts, the importance of

which was previously outlined by Gao et al. (2011). The

proposed system would include data first being fetched from

social media pool, then processed by using numerus data-

mining methods, with each serving a specific purpose. After

data processing, the relevant information constituted by

filtered out tweets would be visually represented to end-

users or, in other words, emergency agencies. The data-

mining was made possible due to the fact that Twitter is

based on open-source software, where developers were free

to use its functionally, for example for retrieval of user

entries, for their own purposes, such as emergency

management. The processing of information included it

being classified by importance, which could assist

emergency agencies when prioritizing where their

emergency response would be needed most, based on

importance of an affected entity and severity of its

condition. This particular classification is indeed critical,

because functionality of vital infrastructure such as electric

stations, roads/bridges might be absolutely essential for

supporting people throughout a crisis situation, however,

information about such problems might be easily

overshadowed by less significant information that does not

have the same importance to a large number of people.

Another thing is that during crisis events people tend post

information about those event to social networks. This

would normally be reflected by a sudden increase in the

number of event-specific entries on Twitter. Detection of

such activities could help emergency organisations to react

to such crisis events in a timelier manner. So, the authors

proposed a burst-detection method that would deal with

such detection and alert when those bursts occur.

Furthermore, the authors also proposed a method which

would process information by applying a clustering

algorithm that would group information by event-specific

and currently relevant topics, constituted by pre-filtered

data, bringing out the ones that are actually accurate and

important to be considered when planning relief efforts.

This clustering could give a comprehensive and, at the same

time, usable understanding of important aspects of a

particular crisis event. Further exploration and thereby

deeper understanding of information collected from social

media could be achieved by analysing users’ entries by geo-

tags and mapping them onto a real map of an affected

region, giving a geographical distribution of tweets. Such

method was also proposed by the authors; however,

understandably, usefulness of such representation would

depend on whether those tweets actually had geo-tags

assigned to them, but it would certainly be a useful tool to

complement other information processing methods. Finally,

after processing, information would be visualised with

respect to how that information was processed. In general,

the proposed system offered a combination of different data-

mining methods for processing user-generated information

collected from Twitter and making it visually readable for

enhancing versatility of situation awareness of emergency

agencies and thereby allowing to make timely and relevant

decisions.

Another more recent research study has also proposed

an information extraction and representation approach

(Middleton, Middleton & Modafferi, 2014), but it was not

quite as advanced, in terms of its multi-layerdness, as the

one presented in the aforementioned research study.

Namely, the authors here focused on geographical

representation of entries made by users on Twitter.

However, aside from lower methodological versatility of

information representation, the precision and reliability of

representation of geographical distribution of tweets was

addressed on a more thorough level. So, rather than being

reliant on tweets being geotagged, which both in this and in

the previous research study was outlined as a fundamental

issue that could render geographical representation of user-

generated information highly unreliable and practically

useless, the authors here introduced a multi-layerdness into

extraction of geographical data about tweets. So, since only

1% of tweets were claimed to have geo-tags, the

information about location of an event would be extracted

even from text of each tweet. It was assumed that

information contained in those tweets would also include

location-specific references that after additional processing

could help to pin-point geographical location of an

emergency all the way to a street-level or a particular

building. So, to describe it abstractly without going too

much into technicalities, in the proposed approach the

tweets would be fetched, their potential geographic tokens

or names of entities would be extracted and associated with

their respective location by using multiple open-source

APIs, after which those tweets with now specified locations

(place, street or region) would be geospatially clustered and

mapped over a map of a chosen area, displaying in real-time

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easily identifiable places with an increased activity of

emergency “signals” submissions by users. In general, the

effectiveness of the proposed approach is heavily depend on

the ability to interpret location-specific references contained

in tweets and match them to real location coordinates, where

some of those references could be expressed in local “slang”

by using non-formal denominations for streets and places.

Therefore, it would be essential for this approach to be used

only by emergency organizations that poses proper

understanding of the actual context of a region that they

operate in. Furthermore, full reliance on tweets having

location-specific references might not be the right way to do

it, because absence of such information could lead to crisis

events being potentially overlooked. This could be

especially problematic in small areas with only few people

who could submit information about a possible crisis or in

remote regions with a limited mobile network coverage and

thereby, once again, a smaller number of potential

information submitters. For that purpose, as it has been

already stated numerous times in this report, it’s essential to

think of this approach as a means to complement other

emergency management techniques in a strategically

aligned and mutually contributing manner, in which case it

would have a chance to actually produce benefits with lower

probability of causing undesirable or even life-threatening

outcomes.

While the aforementioned research study focused on

tweets’ geospatial data analysis with its consequent

geographical visualization, there was another recent

research study (Parsons, Atkinson, Simperl & Weal, 2015)

that focused on thematic analysis of user-generated

information collected from Twitter. Similarly to one of the

methods presented by the previously discussed Yin et al.

(2012), the authors here attempted to classify tweets by their

main theme, which in this case was defined by the type of

information that each tweet was purposed to communicate.

The type of communicated information was determined

based on keywords and the main piece of information

contained in a tweet as well as on the way a tweet was

conveyed. The thematic analysis of the sampled event-

related tweets performed by the proposed method further

indicated that types of tweets were associated with stages of

crisis development. So, as a crisis progressed from its

inception phase, peak of magnitude and till the point when it

started to settle, the information posted by users changed

from being about expression of condolences and general

warnings, then becoming valuable supportive information,

and finally maturing into being more focused and

contextually accurate instructive information. Furthermore,

previously discussed arguments (Middleton, Middleton &

Modafferi, 2014) about volume of tweets being significantly

greater during crisis situations did not quite find its

reflection in this research study, where authors did not

indicate a noticeably higher volume of emergency-related

tweets when UK was flooded in December 2013 and its

effects were just at the initial stages of their development,

but rather high volume of more or less accurate and thereby

usable tweets was indicated when the floods were already at

the peak of their magnitude till the point of their decrease in

intensity in February 2014. This peculiar but rational

observation does question those previously mentioned

arguments about information traffic being greater at the

initial stages of a crisis event, which would actually raise

certain doubts about reliability and accuracy of the

previously discussed burst-detecting method. Rationality of

this observation is justified by the fact that it is not unusual

or surprising to see people post more information about a

crisis as they got more aware of its details.

a. Overview of methods for analysis of user-

generated information on social networks

All three research studies that were reviewed in this sub-

section focused on extraction and analysis of emergency-

related information generated by users on Twitter, which

was stated practically by all authors as having a great

potential in being used by emergency agencies, due to

people using it primarily for broadcasting urgent

information, which in its turn would help to react to

emergencies in a timelier manner. The most frequently

proposed methods for analysis of information were based on

its thematic classification and geographical distribution. In

the following table 4, there is a summary of methods that

were proposed by the authors of the reviewed research

studies for extraction and analysis of information.

TABLE IV

SUMMARY OF INFORMATION EXTRACTION/ANALYSIS METHODS PROPOSED

IN THE REVIEWED RESEARCH STUDIES

Method for analysis Presented in papers

Burst-detection Yin, Lampert, Cameron,

Robinson, & Power, 2012

Geographical clustering /

mapping

Yin, Lampert, Cameron,

Robinson, & Power, 2012;

Middleton, Middleton &

Modafferi, 2014

Thematic clustering Yin, Lampert, Cameron,

Robinson, & Power, 2012;

Parsons, Atkinson, Simperl &

Weal, 2015

Impact classification Yin, Lampert, Cameron,

Robinson, & Power, 2012

January 10, 2016

8

V. Examples of real cases of social media application during

emergencies

There was one research study (Ehnis & Bunker, 2012),

where the authors attempted to explore experiences with

emergency-oriented social media application during the

floods that occurred in Queensland, Australia in 2011. In

that case, in order to interact with their community, the local

police service used such social networks as Twitter and

Facebook in a strategically aligned combination with each

other, where the former one was used for broadcasting a

short message about an issue with the link to a Facebook

account that contained a more detailed information about

that particular issue. It’s important to note that before the

actual floods, the police service had established a proper

social media presence, the importance of which was so

emphasized in the previously discussed research studies

(Alexander, 2014; Anikeeva, Steenkamp & Arbon, 2015).

Namely, just as it was suggested by Alexander (2014),

social media presence was established by assigning staff for

continuous maintenance of accounts on social networks, in

terms of updating information and spreading the word about

their accounts being available for people to turn to for

accessing reliable information during emergencies.

Furthermore, some people might not closely follow the

information posted by the police, so in order to keep people

updated on the latest emergency developments the police

posted summaries of the most important information on a

daily basis. Interestingly, even though the issue with people

being exposed to overwhelmingly inaccurate information on

social networks was addressed as efficiently as possible in

this case by the police service, it still appeared that the two-

sided communication with those people was neglected. In

other words, people were merely “listeners” or receivers of

information rather than contributors to the actual emergency

management process, which was actually the opposite of

what the police had expected from social media. This was

primarily due to the fact that the police service had a limited

staff, while the amount of user comments was simply

overwhelming for them to handle. Besides, the police did

not have any extraction and analysis techniques that could

help them to make use of those comments. So, regardless of

the encountered challenges, the police nonetheless took the

initiative and successfully attempted to enhance their ability

to deliver important information to a larger number of

people in their community during emergencies by utilizing

social media capabilities. Besides, the police used social

media in emergency management when this approach was

not so well investigated, therefore, their experiences were

undoubtedly scientifically valuable and enlightening.

There was another case of social media application that

was studied in one research study (Dashti, Palen, Heris,

Anderson, Anderson & Anderson, 2014). In that case, the

study was based in the context when Colorado was flooded

in 2013 after a series of severe storms, which resulted in

infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, sewage lines etc.) failing

to maintain its integrity and operational state, causing

effects of those floods to be long-lasting effects for several

communities in the region. So, since the state-funded

emergency agency that was responsible for provision of

relief efforts needed to get a detailed assessment about

where and what kind of efforts would have to be deployed

before their actual deployment, they used user-generated

information on social networks, such as Twitter and

YouTube, as sources of necessary intel, considering that on-

site systematic investigation was rendered impossible to

perform by emergency organizations without external

assistance of a community. The first step for collection of

relevant information was to find tweets that contained

keywords matching the ones that were defined through a

pre-study of contextually explorative information (e.g.

journals, social network entries etc.) to be representative of

the particular crisis event, which was done by using

Twitter’s publically available API. Afterwards, the collected

tweets were further analysed and grouped by the type of

information they provided, whether it was about a specific

location (geo-tag, place name) or it was visually more

descriptive information such as photos or videos. The

geospatial data was processed and mapped over the map of

the affected region, presenting the geographical distribution

and extent of emergency-inflicted damage that had to be

dealt with. The analysis was aimed to provide almost

immediate but at the same time useful insight information

that could help the emergency agency to provide optimized

relief efforts as soon as possible. However, the

productiveness of social media application in this case was

due to it not being used as a standalone solution. Namely, as

it was importantly stated by the authors, user-generated

information could not produce a holistic informational

coverage, due to the majority of tweets containing neither

visually descriptive information nor location-specific

information, all of which yelled the need for social media to

be used in mutually complementary combination with other

techniques (e.g. satellite imagery), just as it was suggested

in one of the previously discussed papers (Gao, Barbier &

Goolsby, 2011).

The chemical attack against civilians in Damascus in

Syria in 2013 attracted international attention mainly thanks

to its coverage through social media. So, the authors of one

research study (Rosman, Eisenkraft, Milk, Shiyovich,

Ophir, Shrot & Kassirer, 2014) attempted to investigate that

case and, by keyword-wise identifying relevant videos that

were uploaded to YouTube and then analysing the types of

injuries and symptoms of people recorded in those videos,

to prove that user-generated material on social networks

could be used to make medically accurate conclusions. This

might be useful when there is no other way to gain direct

access to victims and potentially assist local health-workers

by sharing knowledge with them about possible ways of

treatment, especially when talking about a war-torn country

the presence in which for on-site investigation could be

potentially life-threatening. So, in this study, the video

material was analysed, where classification of injuries and

symptoms was performed only by close observation of that

January 10, 2016

9

material. However, as it was importantly mentioned by

authors, the authenticity of posted information could not be

verified. So, on the one hand, the authors managed to

indicate some interesting symptoms that could explain what

caused the mass poisoning in the region, but accuracy of

those indications were largely based on the assumptions,

which is not acceptable for provision of accurate medical

advices. On the other hand, rather than fully relying on

those potentially misleading advices they could perhaps be

treated as potential clues for direction of investigation.

However, unless certain mechanisms are implemented for

verification of reliability and authenticity of information

posted on social networks, it is crucial to be very careful

when using video material posted on YouTube for making

conclusions about diagnosis and ways of treatment,

especially when there is no way to directly examine victims

or at least when information does not originate from reliable

sources. Therefore, rather than fully relying on such

material, it could be used in combination with traditional

techniques employed by a particular medical organization.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Social media has been rapidly gaining popularity, becoming

popular communicational medium for many people all over

the world. People tend to post information about different

about various events, including the ones related to

emergencies. Therefore, such high volumes of information

can be used by emergency agencies when planning their

relief efforts, having a great potential in becoming a

productive component in emergency management.

However, the area of emergency-oriented social media

application is still at an embryonic stage of its

understanding and as it appeared from the analysis of

numerous research studies, it is still largely under-explored

and needs more research studies to scientifically explore its

various aspects. So, in this report, even though it did not aim

to produce new knowledge, it still attempted to explore

aspects of social media usage emergency management

during the last 4 years by analysing some of the currently

available relevant research studies. Namely, the purpose of

this report was to get an insight about currently known

advantages/challenges with usage of social media in

emergency management, approaches that were proposed to

be used for extraction and representation of relevant data as

well as this study sought to explore how social media was

used in real emergency situations.

I. What advantages and challenges arise from usage

of social media in emergency management?

From the three research studies that were analysed with the

purpose of identifying benefits and challenges with usage of

social media in emergency management, it appeared that the

reviewed studies published in the period from 2011 to 2015

had a common argument about one of the fundamental

advantages of social media. Namely, they pointed out its

ability to be used as a source of highly versatile and

valuable user-generated information that can be used to get

a sufficient and nearly immediately acquired amount of

details that can be used to respond as well as to recover

from crisis events with contextual accuracy. At the same

time, as with any Big Data, there is a major challenge with

making use of such high volumes of diverse data. This

challenge was explicitly emphasized not only by the three

research studies analysed in the respective section of this

report, but practically by all research studies chosen for the

review. All of the studies were explicit in their statement

that in order for crowd-sourced information available on

social networks to be useful it would be absolutely essential

to find the ways to not only extract relevant information,

while disregarding inaccurate or deliberately falsified one,

but also to represent it in a comprehensive and easily

readable manner so that emergency agencies could use it

without any outstanding hindrances. Another disadvantage

that was commonly brought up by paper discussed in the

respective section was that dependence of social media

network availability and technology, such as mobile

devices, being depend on electricity (for charging) could be

highly problematic especially during large-scale natural

disasters with high probability of causing severe damage to

such infrastructure. That is why, as it was frequently pointed

out by many of the reviewed research studies, one should

not be blinded by potential advantages of social media in

emergency management, but rather should realistically

understand its highly critical shortcomings and preferably

employ social media in strategically aligned and mutually

contributing combination with other emergency

management techniques, instead of fully relying on its

assumed effectiveness.

II. What types of approaches can be used for

extraction/representation of relevant information

from user-generated content on social networks?

As it appeared from the three research studies that were

reviewed in the respective section of the Literature Review,

one of the most frequently proposed methods for extraction

and consequent representation of relevant user-generated

content retrieved from social networks was based on the

concept of keyword-based identification of relevant user

entries with their consequent thematic clustering, where

information would be grouped by event- or subject specific

topics. The significance of topics would be defined by the

frequency of them being mentioned by people on social

networks. Such clustering could help to bring out the topics

that are actually important to be considered when planning

emergency relief efforts, because an emergency agency

would be able to account for what is really important during

decision making processes. The second most frequently

proposed method for making use of user-generated content

during emergencies was based on the concept of

geographical clustering, where relevant information would

be represented by its geographical distribution by using

specific attributes of users’ entries (e.g. location names, geo-

tags) as geospatial data. The geographical mapping of user-

January 10, 2016

10

generated information onto a real map of an affected region

could give a more visually descriptive understanding of the

extent of a crisis situation and thereby provide necessary

details for a better planning of relief efforts. Unfortunately,

such geographical clustering is not always possible to

perform, because frequently users’ entries on social

networks do not contain location-specific attributes needed

for their geographical representation.

III. How is social media used in emergency

management in real emergency situations?

The diversity of user generated-information being capable

of providing a great informational coverage of a particular

emergency situation with an unprecedented possibility to get

a highly valuable and insightful understanding of its internal

details was emphasized in all three case studies as a main

advantage of social media, which makes it potential in the

area of emergency management very important to be

properly understood. Furthermore, even though the authors

of the three case studies had a common opinion about an

advantage of social media application in emergency

management, they also had a common opinion about the

main challenges that arise from using such approach.

Namely, the previously discussed challenges with extraction

of relevant and accurate/reliable information were

encountered practically in all three of the studied case

studies. However, those challenges were not as critical as

the other research studies have pointed out, perhaps

primarily due to the fact that in the discussed cases social

media was mainly used in combination with other

emergency management techniques, while other research

studies discussed those challenges in the context of social

media being used as a self-sufficient emergency

management technique and a source of information. In

general, from the reviewed research studies it appeared that

there is still no standardized approach on how to extract and

represent user-generated information, which was even

further supported by the discussed case studies, where those

who dealt with disaster relief efforts had come up with their

own ways how to make use of crowdsourced information.

So, they either used custom-designed

extraction/representation techniques, such as geographical

and thematic clustering of information, or in one case, the

relief efforts were based on the simple power of

observation, which could however be very susceptible to

misleading/biased interpretation of information. On the

other hand, the diversity of techniques is understandable

because in different cases there might be a need for a

different type of data and thereby. In some cases, there is a

critical need to have geographical representation of

information, while in other cases (see chemical attack in

Syria) there is a need for a more graphical information.

IV. Limited and future work

Due to the very limited scope of this assignment, it was not

feasible nor necessary to review a larger number of research

studies about emergency-oriented social media application,

which resulted in this report having a somewhat

focused/limited theoretical understanding of this area of

research, but it would certainly be enlightening to get a

more complete understanding. This understanding is

particularly important, considering that it is still at an

embryonic stage, where potential of social media is yet to be

explored and thoroughly understood for its more productive

and seamless utilization as an integral component of a multi-

technique emergency management strategy or as a fully

capable and reliable stand-alone solution to such

management. In general, this report could be used as a first

step towards building a theoretical framework, upon which

an entirely different research study could be based for

further exploration of this important research area.

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