Are we twits for using Twitter?!
This week I welcome a guest contribution from Tomer Simon. Tomer is an Israel based specialist in disaster and emergency management, a social media in emergency management (#smem) researcher and practitioner, public health professional and geophysicist. A full biographical profile can be found below.
-- Steven Kuhr
Social
media as a research tool and resource has become an invaluable source of
information, especially so in crisis management informatics. Hundreds of researchers worldwide
have been using Twitter to extract huge amounts of data in
order to identify perceptions concerning the use patterns and behavior of individuals
during many emergency and crisis situations.
Twitter
is not the only social media network and definitely not the largest or the most
widely used. Current statistics show
that there are approximately 500 million global users on Twitter, but only 200
million are monthly active users. Facebook, on the other hand, recently released
that it had reached the 1.11 billion users globally, with 665 million daily
active users. As can be seen in the following map, Facebook dominates
in 127 out 137 countries worldwide.
So, why do researchers still use Twitter as their social media resource of choice? When we refer to 'social media' do we actually focus on Twitter alone? The simplistic answer is that Twitter provides an easy to use application program interface (API) for data extraction. Furthermore, the essence of Twitter differs from Facebook. Whereas in Facebook the post can be accessed solely by one's friends, or friends of friends, in Twitter the tweets can be accessed by all, and not only followers.
It
has been presented in many studies that individuals, in emergencies, tweet
information that can be used by the emergency authorities to improve their
situational awareness. They also share important information concerning their
community, raise donations and share sympathies and prayers, as well as call
for help. These
types of information are important and can assist during the response and
relief phases of the disaster management. But,
does it really reflect the realities – the one on the ground and the one
collected from the virtual domain?
According
to the Huffington
Post, during hurricane Sandy, approximately 17 million people on the east
coast were affected. The current US population includes almost 316 million
people. It is estimated
that in the US alone there are 140 million Twitter users, out of which only a
third are active on a monthly basis. This leaves approximately 50 million active
users across the USA. For convenience it will be assumed that a third of the
users are on the east coast, a third on the west and a third spread through the
rest. A third means 17 million users out of a total of 117 million people
living across the eastern sea board. So, until now we are left with a tenth of
the entire population that uses Twitter once a month (people who use it on a
daily basis are a fraction of this number).
Despite
Twitter's presumed openness, many limitations prevail on the amount of data
that can be extracted or the time intervals of extraction[1]. Even
on the new 1.1
API Twitter has imposed limitations that inhibit the possibility to extract
all of the required information.
Another
way to extract data is through the Twitter stream API. But, this is limited to
approx. 1% of the entire stream.
What
can we learn from the usage statistics Twitter had released
during hurricane Sandy?
During
the seven day period of October 27th until November 1st a
total of approx. 1.4 billion tweets were disseminated
globally. A total of 20 million tweets were sent during the
same period with the terms "sandy" and/or "hurricane",
meaning only 1.4% of the entire stream. If
we choose to use the API stream then we will get only 1.4% out the 1% stream
respectively, which leaves us with a potential use of 0.0014% of the tweets to
work with.Many
studies rely also on the geo-tagging capabilities of tweets, but current
research shows that only 2-3% of tweets are geocoded.
Tweeting
requires expertise; occasional users will find it difficult to convey
useful/actionable information with 140 characters. Research shows that users
which are proficient in Twitter usually tweet, and will tweet in an emergency,
more than once a day, but many of the tweets originate from people that are not
personally involved in the emergency. So once more we are left with even less
unique users to work with.
Considering
the above mentioned constraints, how can academic research be conducted when it
is not possible to generalize the findings to the population? Is it beneficial
to conduct research based only on online users who have a Twitter account and
are proficient in using it? Academia
aside, can we as emergency managers rely on so little information when we try
to build a status report? Can we act and send emergency personnel and resources
to the field following a tweet or a post?
Maybe
those who can tweet are not the ones in the worst situation that require
assistance, after all their "ABC's" are probably
ok.
[1] This is based on
the assumption that the extracting application uses a single Twitter token and
adheres to the Twitter terms of use.
About the contributor:
Tomer Simon, MPH, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Emergency Medicine Department, in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the enterprise architect of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, and founder and coordinator of Israel's largest website for emergency preparedness and readiness (http://ready.org.il). In the last three years Simon has specialized in emergency management and especially leveraging social media for disaster preparedness and response. His bachelor degree (B.Sc.) is in Geophysics, and a graduate degree in public health (MPH) from Tel Aviv University. For the 13 years he held various IT positions, and led and managed a large R&D group in a leading multi-national company. He is a Major (res.) in the IDF's Homefront Command.
--
Steven Kuhr
Emergency Management Nexus
Disaster History
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