This paper examines social media use after a tragic disaster in a rural community in the United States—the 2014 Oso Landslide. Drawing upon interviews with community members and digital traces from multiple platforms, we explore how affected locals, government responders and journalists utilized a broad range of social media in their work—assembling different platforms to meet the information n...

In the last years a new right-wing, populist and eurosceptic party emerged in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland. Topics that were used by the party to draw attention to their program included the Euro-crisis and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We investigate some aspects of social media use of the AfD. Our goal is to relate the rise of this party to some quantitative measures of their so...

Numerous conferences organized in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1997–98 offered analyses of what went wrong in the crisis countries. The immediacy of the crisis prompted a number of reform proposals directed toward reducing the risk of future crises. However, now that the crisis has abated, reform appears to be much lower on most political agendas, and the progress that countries are...

Twitter has been regarded as an outstanding social media application due to its immediacy in communication. Twitter has experienced exponential growth and been used for various purposes including crisis communication. However, there have been less empirical studies on Twitter messages (tweets) posted during crisis. In this paper, we analyse the tweets that were posted during Australia’s worst f...

As social media has become more integrated into peoples’ daily lives, its users have begun turning to it in times of distress. People use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms to broadcast their needs, propagate rumors and news, and stay abreast of evolving crisis situations. Disaster relief organizations have begun to craft their efforts around pulling data about where a...

This review defines crisis risk communication, traces its origins to a number of applied fields, and then shows how basic principles have become incorporated into emergency preparedness and risk communication for public health. Literature from four different disciplines that inform crisis risk communications are reviewed. These are (a) environmental risk communication, (b) disaster management, ...

Do the media cover the considerations and actions of Congress with respect to the financial crisis, or do politicians follow the lead of the media? This paper shows how relevant information about the functioning of press and politics can be acquired using keyword search, VAR analysis and granger causality. Media lead Congress, but no influence is found for problem diagnosis and solutions. We co...

To this date, research on crisis informatics has focused on the detection of trust in Twitter data through the use of message structure, sentiment, propagation and author. Little research has examined the effects of perceived emotion of these messages in the crisis response domain. Toward detecting useful messages in case of crisis, we examine perceived emotions of these messages and how the di...