Cross-platform analysis of public responses to the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence on Twitter and Reddit

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) have become a powerful tool to study collective human responses to extreme events such as earthquakes. Most previous research concentrated on a single platform and utilized users’ behaviors on a single platform to study people’s general responses. In this study, we explore the characteristics of people’s behaviors on different OSNs and conduct a cross-platform analysis of public responses to earthquakes. Our findings support the Uses and Gratification theory that users on Reddit and Twitter are engaging with platforms that they may feel best reflect their sense of self. Using the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes as our study cases, we collected 510,579 tweets and 45,770 Reddit posts (including 1437 submissions and 44,333 comments) to answer the following research questions: (1) What were the similarities and differences between public responses on Twitter and Reddit? (2) Considering the different mechanisms of Twitter and Reddit, what unique information of public responses can we learn from Reddit as compared with Twitter? By answering these research questions, we aim to bridge the gap of cross-platform public responses research towards natural hazards. Our study evinces that the users on the two different platforms have both different topics of interest and different sentiments towards the same earthquake, which indicates the necessity of investigating cross-platform OSNs to reveal a more comprehensive picture of people’s general public responses towards certain disasters. Our analysis also finds that r/conspiracy subreddit is one of the major venues where people discuss the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes on Reddit and different misinformation/conspiracies spread on Twitter and Reddit platforms (e.g., “Big one is coming” on Twitter and “Nuclear test” on Reddit).

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TF-IDF Weighting to Detect Spammer Accounts on Twitter based on Tweets and Retweet Representation of Tweets

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Public earthquake communication in Italy through a multi-source social media platform: The INGVterremoti experience (2010–2022)

“…Both USGS and GNS Science have a section of their websites dedicated to analyses and insights on specific themes (not only on earthquakes), although the number of posts dedicated to seismological topics is much more limited than what is done by INGVterremoti. Most efforts of USGS, GNS Science, and EMSC experts are devoted to post-event assessment and seismic sequence communication management and problems (Wein et al, 2015;Bossu et al, 2018;Becker et al, 2019;Wald, 2020;Ruan et al, 2022). An interesting analysis on the impact of INGV communication on the media comparing the two main seismic sequences of the last decade (the 2012 Emilia earthquake, the 2016 central Italy seismic sequence) has been carried out by Cerase (2017).…”