Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events

Abstract

This paper offers a descriptive account of Twitter (a micro-blogging service) across four high profile, mass convergence events-two emergency and two national security. We statistically examine how Twitter is being used surrounding these events, and compare and contrast how that behavior is different from more general Twitter use. Our findings suggest that Twitter messages sent during these types of events contain more displays of information broadcasting and brokerage, and we observe that general Twitter use seems to have evolved over time to offer more of an information-sharing purpose. We also provide preliminary evidence that Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a mass convergence or emergency event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.

Decomposing issue patterns in crisis communication: the case of the lost airliner

“…Being an eyewitness of a crisis event has considerable potential to engage people in interaction via social media (Zhang and Vos, 2014). Such messages may spread widely, especially via Twitter, which lacks gatekeeping and can thus disseminate issues rapidly via its large user base (Hughes and Palen, 2009;Pang et al, 2014). 'Twitter Journalism' also seems to offer the stamp of public approval when accompanied with live images (Tam, 2012), for which reason news media monitor Twitter for confirmation of breaking news (Terdiman, 2014).…”

Further explication of mega-crisis concept and feasible responses

“…The organization can adopt either a managerial perspective or a political perspective [14]. The former involves crisis managers devising a comprehensive strategy for crisis response.…”

Learning Semantic Relationships between Entities in Twitter

“…Some questioned the usability of Twitter especially for novice users [19], studied capturing comprehensive locality information to be used for viewing tweets in the current local position of the mobile device [14], researched discovering and ranking fresh web sites using tweets [8], investigated the social aspects of group polarization over time in Twitter [22], while others exploited Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events [12]. Research on temporal dynamics and information propagation on Twitter mostly focused on hashtags or observations of other sets of words in the tweets [16,17,11,20,3].…”

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