Content-based user classifier to uncover information exchange in disaster-motivated networks

PLoS One. 2021 Nov 16;16(11):e0259342. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259342. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Disasters strike communities around the world, with a reduced time-frame for warning and action leaving behind high rates of damage, mortality, and years in rebuilding efforts. For the past decade, social media has indicated a positive role in communicating before, during, and after disasters. One important question that remained un-investigated is that whether social media efficiently connect affected individuals to disaster relief agencies, and if not, how AI models can use historical data from previous disasters to facilitate information exchange between the two groups. In this study, the BERT model is first fine-tuned using historical data and then it is used to classify the tweets associated with hurricanes Dorian and Harvey based on the type of information provided; and alongside, the network between users is constructed based on the retweets and replies on Twitter. Afterwards, some network metrics are used to measure the diffusion rate of each type of disaster-motivated information. The results show that the messages by disaster eyewitnesses get the least spread while the posts by governments and media have the highest diffusion rates through the network. Additionally, the "cautions and advice" messages get the most spread among other information types while "infrastructure and utilities" and "affected individuals" messages get the least diffusion even compared with "sympathy and support". The analysis suggests that facilitating the propagation of information provided by affected individuals, using AI models, will be a valuable strategy to pursue in order to accelerate communication between affected individuals and survival groups during the disaster and aftermath.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Cyclonic Storms
  • Disasters*
  • Motivation
  • Social Media*
  • Social Networking

Grants and funding

Part of the research performed by Carlo Lipizzi leading to these results have received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Contract [HQ0034-19-D-0003, TO#0150]. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript; • Part of the research performed by Jose E. Ramirez-Marquez leading to these results have received funding from the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland under grant agreement no: 293446—Platform Value Now: Value Capturing in the fast-emerging platform ecosystems.