Abstract
Communication during and after disasters increasingly relies on social media technologies. For example, victims, emergency responders, and others took to Twitter to share information about conditions, aid, resources and the like in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. The current paper concerns how a re-tweet count, or the number of others who have already forwarded a message, influences people’s spreading of disaster-related tweets. The results of a human-subjects experiment revealed that, when the re-tweet count of a tweet increased, the likelihood that people would share the tweet increased when it came from an individual’s account, but the likelihood decreased when it came from a news agency’s account. These social influences disappeared when the re-tweet counts were over 1000 people. These findings extend the understanding of how disaster-related information spreads on social media, which is essential for improving social media during disaster management.
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1138658 and Grant No. BCS-1244742. The research reported here is part of HL’s doctoral dissertation at Stevens Institute of Technology.
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©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Network Disaster Response Effectiveness: The Case of ICTs and Hurricane Katrina
- Principle-Based Design: A Methodology and Principles for Capitalizing Design Experiences for Information Quality Assurance
- Increasing Evacuation Communication Through ICTs: An Agent-based Model Demonstrating Evacuation Practices and the Resulting Traffic Congestion in the Rush to the Road
- Managing Network Based Governance Structures in Disasters: The Case of the Passau Flood in 2013
- Geographic Information Systems for Disaster Response: A Review
- Determinants of Emergency Management Decision Support Software Technology: An Empirical Analysis of Social Influence in Technology Adoption
- Using Social Multimedia Content to Inform Emergency Planning of Recurring and Cyclical Events in Local Communities
- Social Media and the Virality of Risk: The Risk Amplification through Media Spread (RAMS) Model
- Social Media in Crisis: When Professional Responders Meet Digital Volunteers
- Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets
- Re-Tweet Count Matters: Social Influences on Sharing of Disaster-Related Tweets
- Synthetic Environments for Investigating Collaborative Information Seeking: An Application in Emergency Restoration of Critical Infrastructures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Network Disaster Response Effectiveness: The Case of ICTs and Hurricane Katrina
- Principle-Based Design: A Methodology and Principles for Capitalizing Design Experiences for Information Quality Assurance
- Increasing Evacuation Communication Through ICTs: An Agent-based Model Demonstrating Evacuation Practices and the Resulting Traffic Congestion in the Rush to the Road
- Managing Network Based Governance Structures in Disasters: The Case of the Passau Flood in 2013
- Geographic Information Systems for Disaster Response: A Review
- Determinants of Emergency Management Decision Support Software Technology: An Empirical Analysis of Social Influence in Technology Adoption
- Using Social Multimedia Content to Inform Emergency Planning of Recurring and Cyclical Events in Local Communities
- Social Media and the Virality of Risk: The Risk Amplification through Media Spread (RAMS) Model
- Social Media in Crisis: When Professional Responders Meet Digital Volunteers
- Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets
- Re-Tweet Count Matters: Social Influences on Sharing of Disaster-Related Tweets
- Synthetic Environments for Investigating Collaborative Information Seeking: An Application in Emergency Restoration of Critical Infrastructures