Recent extreme events show that Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is emerging as the dominant social reporting tool to spread information on social crises. It is elevating the online public community to the status of first responders who can collectively cope with social crises. However, at the same time, many warnings have been raised about the reliability of community intelligence obtained through social reporting by the amateur online community. Using rumor theory, this paper studies citizen-driven information processing through Twitter services using data from three social crises: the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, the Toyota recall in 2010, and the Seattle café shooting incident in 2012. We approach social crises as communal efforts for community intelligence gathering and collective information processing to cope with and adapt to uncertain external situations. We explore two issues: (1) collective social reporting as an information processing mechanism to address crisis problems and gather community intelligence, and (2) the degeneration of social reporting into collective rumor mills. Our analysis reveals that information with no clear source provided was the most important, personal involvement next in importance, and anxiety the least yet still important rumor causing factor on Twitter under social crisis situations.

Abstract:In this paper, we first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates "crowds," outsourcing, and social web technologies. We then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing websites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on our analysis, we develop a "taxonomic theory" of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. We also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems. Keywords:Crowdsourcing; outsourcing; e-business; social web; social media; advanced Internet technologies; Web 2.0. † Gregory D. Saxton, Department of Communication, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, New York; Onook Oh, The Center for Collaboration Science, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE; Rajiv Kishore, Department of Management Science and Systems, School of Management, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. * The authors would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments and suggestions. The reviewers and editors of the Fourth Global Sourcing Workshop (March 22-25, 2010, Zermatt, Switzerland) also provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Please direct correspondence to Gregory Saxton, Department of Communication, University at Buffalo, SUNY. Email: gdsaxton@buffalo.edu 2 Taking advantage of the growing acceptance of social web technologies 1 , entrepreneurs big and small are continually creating and experimenting with innovative sourcing models. One of the most buzzworthy models is "crowdsourcing," whereby businesses use the Web to harness the efforts of a virtual "crowd" to achieve specific organizational tasks. Crowdsourcing thus takes advantage of many of the same technological features that characterize "social media," the technology that enables online communities through which users can interact with those of similar interests. However, crowdsourcing is distinct from pure social media applications in that it not only actively involves a diverse crowd of users but actively controls the online community through sophisticated management schemes involving compensation, copyright protection, and the like. Simply put, while social media sites place emphasis on the social aspect of community, crowdsourcing involves the management of a community via Web-based collaborative technologies to elicit the community's knowledge and/or skill sets and thus fulfill a pre-identified business goal.In effect, despite its "buzzword" status, we argue there is an identifiable core to crowdsourcing, and that this important goal-oriented strategic micro-outsourcing model has received scant attention from academic audiences. This paper aims to correct this deficiency by developing an empirically grounded taxonomy of crowdsourcing models that can drive future research.The specific goals of this paper are as follows: First, because of the confusing state of academic and popular discussion of crowdsourcing,...

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This paper analyzes the role of situational information as an antecedent of terrorists' opportunistic decision making in the volatile and extreme environment of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We especially focus on how Mumbai terrorists monitored and utilized situational information to mount attacks against civilians. Situational information which was broadcast through live media and Twitter contributed to the terrorists' decision making process and, as a result, increased the effectiveness of hand-held weapons to accomplish their terrorist goal. By utilizing a framework drawn from Situation Awareness (SA) theory, this paper aims to (1) analyze the content of Twitter postings of the Mumbai terror incident, (2) expose the vulnerabilities of Twitter as a participatory emergency reporting system in the terrorism context, and (3), based on the content analysis of Twitter postings, we suggest a conceptual framework for analyzing information control in the context of terrorism.

This study explores the role of social media in social change by analyzing Twitter data collected during the 2011 Egypt Revolution. Particular attention is paid to the notion of collective sense making, which is considered a critical aspect for the emergence of collective action for social change. We suggest that collective sense making through social media can be conceptualized as human-machine collaborative information processing that involves an interplay of signs, Twitter grammar, humans, and social technologies. We focus on the occurrences of hashtags among a high volume of tweets to study the collective sense-making phenomena of milling and keynoting. A quantitative Markov switching analysis is performed to understand how the hashtag frequencies vary over time, suggesting structural changes that depict the two phenomena. We further explore different hashtags through a qualitative content analysis and find that, although many hashtags were used as symbolic anchors to funnel online users’ attention to the Egypt Revolution, other hashtags were used as part of tweet sentences to share changing situational information. We suggest that hashtags functioned as a means to collect information and maintain situational awareness during the unstable political situation of the Egypt Revolution.

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Twitter is a social news service in which information is selected and distributed by individual members of the tweet audience. While communication literature has studied traditional news media and the propagation of information, to our knowledge there have been no studies of the new social media and their impacts on the propagation of news during extreme event situations. This exploration attempts to build an understanding of how preexisting hyperlink structures on the Web and different types of information channels affect Twitter audiences' information selection. The study analyzes the concentration of user-selected information sources in Twitter about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. There are three findings. First, a statistical test of a power-law structure revealed that, while a wide range of information was selected and redistributed by Twitter users, the aggregation of these selections over-represented a small number of prominent websites. Second, binomial regression analyses showed that Twitter user selections were not constituted randomly but were affected by the number of hyperlinks received and the types of information channels. Third, temporal analyses revealed that sources via social media channels were more prominently selected especially in the later stages of the news information lifespan.