“Social media triangulation” to help emergency responders
The second approach using keywords and content searches is slightly more effective, but still poses problems. “It’s difficult to search for keywords. Often, they’re the most visible to people outside that area,” he said. In most research a combination of geotags and keywords is utilized in order to identify local information.
A third and rarely explored approach, that the team refers to as “social triangulation,” identifies local social media users and the information they post according to the characteristics of their social networks. This is the answer Grace believes will allow officials to pinpoint people in a local area. It’s based off the notion that while users may not include explicit geographical information through geotags, their social networks can hold many clues to their whereabouts.
“It’s a very simple observation that we can look at someone’s social network and infer their location based on the characteristics of that network,” said Grace. “People in a local area tend to follow local organizations. This suggests a method of some utility.”
To test the effectiveness of their new approach, the team created a catalogue of organizations in the State College area that maintained a Twitter account and broke them down into various groups. They then extracted and analyzed data on the followers of those organizations to determine if they were truly located in State College.
The groups consisted of users who followed one, two, and multiple organizations within the area, like the local animal shelter or library, in addition to looking at their self-identified profile location.
“We identified 54,165 Twitter accounts associated with State College,” he shared. “We suggest that this method greatly expands the ability for someone to identify local people and monitor information posted by those people.”
Grace explained that academic research into this topic is crucial, as it can help communities prepare for and respond to unexpected disasters. “There’s been a general shift in emergency management to emphasize, like in healthcare, [that] instead of treating the disease, [we focus on] preventative care. That’s the same with emergency management, a shift to resilience and preparedness,” he said.
The theory is that by developing a preexisting dissemination plan, groups can send out their messages via Twitter to reach a wider audience. “You could tailor the type of message to the type of people you want to reach,” Grace explained. For instance, officials could identify and partner with local veterinarians’ social media channels to reach out to their followers and recommend shelters that are available to house pets during a hurricane.
With the public’s increased reliance on smartphones, Grace acknowledges that the first option for many to find and receive information is in their pockets. If social media is people’s go-to news source, he explained, then emergency officials must participate. This type of collaboration also allows citizens to play an active role in their community preparedness.
When this research is implemented, Grace says, “In the wake of something happening, [social triangulation] gives you a better understanding of not just the people in the community, but also how you can reach them.”
