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TWITTER AND DISASTERS

a

Dhiraj Murthy & Scott A. Longwell

Department of Sociology and Anthropology , Bowdoin

College , 7000 College Station, Brunswick , ME ,
04011 , USA
b

Bowdoin College , Brunswick , ME , 04011 , USA

Published online: 25 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Dhiraj Murthy & Scott A. Longwell (2013) TWITTER AND
DISASTERS, Information, Communication & Society, 16:6, 837-855, DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2012.696123
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Dhiraj Murthy & Scott A. Longwell

TWITTER AND DISASTERS
The uses of Twitter during the 2010

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Pakistan floods

This research explores the specific use of the prominent social media website Twitter
during the 2010 Pakistan floods to examine whether users tend to tweet/retweet
links from traditional versus social media, what countries these users are tweeting
from, and whether there is a correlation between location and the linking of traditional versus social media. The study finds that Western users have an overwhelming preference for linking to traditional media and Pakistani users have a slight
preference for linking to social media. The study also concludes that authorities
and hubs in our sample have a significant preference for linking to social
media rather than traditional media sites. The findings of this study suggest that
there is a perceived legitimacy of social media during disasters by users in
Pakistan. Additionally, it provides insights into how social media may be
albeit minimally challenging the dominant position of traditional media in
disaster reporting in developing countries.
Keywords Twitter; social network analysis; authority; network ties;
social factors; new media
(Received 7 October 2011; final version received 3 May 2012)

Introduction
Social media has become an important source of information for some individuals
during and in the aftermath of disasters. In particular, Twitter, the most prominent social media service, has become more commonly used by Internet-using
individuals to keep abreast of breaking news regarding disasters and updates
which may be coming in frequently throughout the day. Twitter and similar
microblog social media sites are inherently built for individual users to subscribe
to flows of information. In the case of Twitter, users who are interested in
breaking news follow the Twitter feeds of traditional news media. What is
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 16, No. 6, August 2013, pp. 837 855
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.696123

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

also particularly unique to social media is that users can then elect to follow the
updates of users who they feel are close to a disaster. In the case of Twitter, a user
who is interested in a particular disaster searches for it. They then can choose to
follow the tweets of ordinary users reporting on the disaster (i.e. citizen journalists) or they can simply read the feeds of these users.
This research uses the 2010 floods in Pakistan as a case study. The floods in
Pakistan caused enormous loss of life, significant environmental destruction, and
a large-scale humanitarian crisis. The United Nations quickly labeled the situation in Pakistan as a catastrophe; 1,802 were reported dead and 2,994
injured (Associated Press of Pakistan 2010). The United Nations World Food
Programme estimated that 1.8 million people were in dire need of water,
food and shelter(The Irish Times 2010). In the case of the floods, the vast majority
of the affected population were digital have-nots prior to the flooding. National
broadband penetration was a mere 0.31% (International Telecommunication
Union 2010). Additionally, the areas affected are predominantly home to
Urdu language speakers, rather than English language speakers. By early
August 2010, the floods became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter,
placing it in a list of the top 10 trending topics on Twitters homepage. The
floods were also the third most popular trending topic in 2010 in Twitters
News Events category (Twitter.com 2010). Trending topics appear as links
within the profile pages of all Twitter users. Additionally, given this placement
within Twitter as well as search engine results, users are known to be guided to
trending topics (Abrol & Khan 2010).
Though other studies have offered analyses of disaster situations using
Twitter (Hughes et al. 2008; Hughes & Palen 2009; Kireyev et al. 2009; Palen
et al. 2010; Vieweg et al. 2010; Doan et al. 2011; Tucker 2011), this study is
more unique in its focus on a disaster in a developing country. The search
term Pakistan was chosen for data collection as it was the exact text string
of the Twitter trending topic. There are other tags relating to the Pakistan
floods including PKFloodRelief. However, due to its status as trending topic,
the most substantial traffic regarding the floods was associated with this official
trending topic. In this study, we collected 42,814 tweets spanning a 50-hour
period containing the search term Pakistan; 27,193 tweets linked to an external
site. These data are analyzed to explore: (1) how Twitter is being used in disaster
situations; (2) whether users tend to tweet/retweet links from traditional or
social media; and (3) what countries had the highest frequency of tweets
during the initial aftermath of the 2010 Pakistan floods.
This article will first briefly introduce the disasters literature regarding
Twitter. It will then explain the methods of data collection including what
search term was used and how user location of tweets was discerned. Lastly,
results from the study will be presented which reveal that tweets more frequently linked to traditional media rather than social media sources. However,
for Pakistan-based users, there is a slight preference for linking to social

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TWITTER AND DISASTERS

media. Influential users in the network also had a marked preference for linking
to social media. The implications of this study are significant for two key reasons.
First, they provide evidence that there may be a perceived legitimacy of social
media during disasters by users in developing countries. This potentially presents
a challenge to the elite hold of traditional media (Meraz 2009). The second
implication is that despite tweets from users in Western countries far outnumbering those by Pakistani users, the latter remain important users to the
network. They are not completely overshadowed by Western users. This potentially signals a challenge to the dominant position Western media have in their
traditional role of disseminating information regarding disasters in developing
countries (Gaddy & Tanjong 1986).

Twitter and disasters

Before examining the role of Twitter in the Pakistan floods in specific, it is useful
to present an overview of the emergent literature on Twitter and disasters. As
Palen et al. (2010) note, it is meaningful to begin to think of Twitter and
other social media as serving different functions among different user groups
during different events. As Kiriyev et al. (2009) observe, research on the
usage of social media and disaster events has been growing, covering a range
of sites including social networking sites, photo repositories, and microblogging
sites. Twitter has also been used for disaster relief efforts by major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including the Red Cross (Tucker 2011). The discussion was of natural disasters on Twitter or a critical turning point of bringing
the microblogging site to mainstream attention (with the US presidential election
as a very important other; Tumasjan et al. 2010). As Murthy (2011) argues, the
downing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River in New York in 2009
and Twitters use in covering the story legitimized the site as a journalistic
space. Specifically, Janis Krums, a passenger on a passing Midtown ferry took
a picture of the downed aircraft on his iPhone and circulated it on Twitter via
the sites photo sharing portal, TwitPic. This happened well before any news
crews arrived in many major news media used his iPhone picture in print
media with the Associated Press eventually purchasing distribution rights.
MSNBC had him on the phone within 30 minutes of him posting on Twitter.
The October 2007 wildfires in Southern California were perhaps the first
natural disaster that put Twitter on the map. As Hughes and Palen (2009,
p. 1) note, Twitter was used to inform citizens of the time-critical information
about road closures, community evacuations, shifts in fire lines, and shelter information. Another man-made disaster in which Twitter became important and,
indeed, controversial were the Mumbai bomb blasts of 2008 where everyday
Indians were tweeting about which hotels have been taken over by armed
gunmen, where fires were still burning, and where shots had been fired

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

(Murthy 2010). Because tweets are so short, researchers found them to be a

medium especially well suited to communicating real-time information during
disasters (Hughes & Palen 2009). As Palen et al. (2010) note, the implications
of social media are significant for mass emergency events. In their case study of
the 2009 Red River Valley flood, they found significant cases of individuals tweeting about their disaster experience as well as about aid organizations involved
(Palen et al. 2010). Though this was also the case with Pakistan, this was not
the case with the Urdu language tweets analyzed. Indeed, the volume of tweets
in Urdu about the flood was so low that we did not obtain enough data to run
significant statistical analysis (as will be discussed in the subsequent section).

Method
Identifying a sample
Because Twitter is a global medium which includes tweets in many languages, we
ran a beta test to see what impact Urdu language tweets were having during the
Pakistan floods. Based on Pakistans low broadband penetration and base of
Urdu-language speakers, it was expected that tweets regarding the floods
would be from Western countries (and to some extent India), rather than
citizen journalists on the ground in Pakistan. However, we tested for the possibility of a significant cohort of Urdu language Twitter users in Pakistan. Data was
collected from 7 29 8/3/2010 for the search term flood in Urdu. A search
, the Urdu word for flood. In determining the search
was run for
(heavy rains) and
(Pakistan) were also run. The
terms,
search for heavy rains yielded only eight tweets and the search term for Pakistan
yielded more tweets regarding negative perceptions of British Prime Minister
David Cameron by Pakistanis rather than referring to the flood. For the Urdu
search of flood, a total of 146 tweets were collected. One hundred and seventeen of these contained external URLs (see Table 1). Of note, only one of these
tweets was a retweet. The Urdu data set consisted of a total of 44 unique Twitter
users. Of the top 20 users tweeting, 11 were organizations and 9 were individuals. The most tweets (18) were sent by an individual, who happened to be a
spammer, and the second most sent by Daily Pakistan (17), a news site.
Though the vast majority of links were to news sites (excepting for spam),
one user, a woman in Islamabad, Pakistan, was acting as a citizen journalist. She
posted three pictures from the Swat valley area and posted them to her Facebook
album and sent tweets linking to it. Each of the pictures had a description of an
eyewitness account of what was happening in the area. Because of the limited size
of this data set (N 44), we determined that the investigation of Urdu language
tweets was beyond the remit of this research and was best suited for a future
qualitative ethnographic study.

TWITTER AND DISASTERS

TABLE 1

Urdu language tweet frequency by external links.

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Website

Number of tweets with linking URLs

Various spam websites

22

Daily Pakistan

12

Jang Daily Newspaper, Pakistan

British Broadcasting Corporation Urdu website

One Pakistan News

News Urdu

Voice of America Dari (Persian)

GEOnews Urdu

Personal users Facebook pictures

Islam Times Newspaper photo gallery

Facebook album of Channel 5 TV Pakistan

Other sites

43

Sample
For our study, tweets were collected by accessing the Twitter search API during
the periods when the text string Pakistan was most active. The data set is composed of 50 hours worth of tweets broken into five 10-hour slices gathered
during August 2010 (08/4, 08/11, 08/13 14, 08/15, and 08/16). A crosssection of time and day segments was selected to capture tweets from around
the world and not just from North American time zones. A total of 42,814
tweets were collected. In addition to this data set, we created a relationship
subset which included only tweets with an at-sign mention (e.g. @user). This
included retweets. In this subset, our data consisted of 13,259 unique users
who were directing tweets to each other or retweeting.
In the relationship data set, each tweet was coded as an arc with the tweet
originator (ego) as the sender and the Twitter user being mentioned (alter) as the
recipient. Different nominal values were assigned to arcs depending on the type
of at-sign mention (1: recipient was the first user mentioned at the start of the
tweet, 2: recipient was mentioned at the start of the tweet but not first, 3: recipient was mentioned somewhere else in the body of the tweet, 4: recipient was
mentioned first in a retweet, 5: recipient was mentioned in a retweet but not
first). We used boyd et al.s (2010, p. 3) rubric for determining retweets
(RT: @, retweeting @, retweet @, (via @), RT (via @), thx @,
HT @, and r @).
One of our modalities by which to better understand the large-scale network
which our data set represented was through social network analysis (SNA) (Scott
2000; Carrington et al. 2005), a social scientific method to visually map networks. As the data set was stored to reflect relationships between Twitter

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

FIGURE 1

Tweet-embedded links corresponding to one of the top 100 domains.

users following the nominal values mentioned in the previous section, we were
able to create a visual map with country and city as variables. A total of 33,141
arcs involving 13,259 unique vertices (i.e. unique users) were analyzed (see
Figure 2). The SNA software Pajek was used to help visualize network ties of
Twitter users tweeting about Pakistan as a whole (especially to gauge the
density of the network). Pajek was also used to discern which Twitter users
were considered to be hubs and authorities, concepts used in SNA to
denote vertices which are considered to be an authority (i.e. a source of information to be trusted) and a hub (i.e. an important clearinghouse to find information from authorities). In the case of the Internet, as Kleinberg (1999)
notes, hubs have the tendency to link out to authorities, but the inverse is not
necessarily true. Additionally, he notes that authorities may not link heavily to
other authorities. Network partitions of the 100 most important hubs and authorities (as calculated by Pajek) were created. These data were used to render
visualizations which show not only intra-hub and intra-authority connections,
but also show the density of links from them to the network as a whole. The
purpose of this was to gain macro representations of our sample. We also
used these network partitions to test for correlation between a Twitter users
country of origin and the status of hub or authority.
The top 100 domains to which Twitter users in our data set linked to were
hand coded. Outbound links were classified into four categories of media (Traditional, Social, Aggregator, and governmental organization/NGO). Traditional
media is defined as the websites of print and broadcast journalism. Social media is

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TWITTER AND DISASTERS

FIGURE 2

The 10 most important authorities and their connections to the whole network.

defined as user-generated media (blogs, videos, geo-location micro-blogs, question/answer sites, and other user-generated news). Some non-user generated
news sites such as the Huffington Post are coded as social as these sites rely on
blog-based contributors and are not print or broadcast-based. Aggregator sites
are defined as portals bringing together news and information from both traditional
and social media (aggregator sites generally prioritized traditional media sources
over social ones). Governmental organizations/NGOs were coded based on
either governmental affiliation or NGO status. For transparency, categorization
of the top 50 domains by frequency is listed in Table 2.

URL and domain extraction

Many tweets contain hyperlinks (URLs) referencing content on other sites. In
order to conserve characters, Twitter usually shortens full URLs automatically

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

TABLE 2

Top 50 most frequently linked to domains by category.

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Domain

Frequency

Type

1,080

Traditional

www.bbc.co.uk

news.yahoo.com

737

Aggregator

www.guardian.co.uk

501

Traditional

www.cnn.com

465

Traditional

news.google.com

461

Aggregator

www.facebook.com

456

Social

www.youtube.com

454

Social

www.nytimes.com

443

Traditional

twitpic.com

386

Social

10

www.pheedcontent.com

381

Aggregator

11

www.boston.com

358

Traditional

12

tribune.com.pk

306

Traditional

13

twitter.com

297

Social

14

www.dawn.com

266

Traditional

15

www.reuters.com

230

Traditional

16

edition.cnn.com

219

Traditional

17

www.twitionger.com

216

Social

18

engiish.aijazeera.net

213

Traditional

19

www.huffingtonpost.com

210

Social

20

www.state.gov

202

Govt./NGO

21

www.googie.com

195

Traditional

22

www.spiegei.de

162

Traditional

23

www.unicef.org.uk

162

Govt./NGO

24

www.npr.org

150

Traditional

25

www.tagesschau.de

143

Traditional

26

www.telegraph.co.uk

140

Traditional

27

www.unicef.org

132

Govt./NGO

28

www.trampmagazine.com

130

Traditional

29

www.onepakistan.com

129

Social

30

humanitariannews.org

124

Social

31

biogs.bettor.com

114

Social

32

earthobservatory. nasa.gov

113

Govt./NGO

33

www.newzfor.me

109

Aggregator

34

uk.reuters.com

106

Traditional

35

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

99

Traditional

36

www.aiertnet.org

96

Social
Continued

TWITTER AND DISASTERS

TABLE 2

Continued

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Domain

Frequency

Type

37

www.cbc.ca

93

Traditional

38

www.businessweek.com

90

Traditional

39

www.abc.net.au

86

Traditional

40

www.msnbc.msn.com

85

Traditional

41

search.yahoo.com

84

Other

42

search2know.com

81

Aggregator

43

freedomist.com

80

Social

44

www.dec.org.uk

78

Govt./NGO

45

www.voanews.com

78

Traditional

46

www.unicef.org

77

Govt./NGO

47

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk

76

Traditional

48

www.csmonitor.com

74

Traditional

49

www.unhcr.org

73

Govt./NGO

50

www3.treasurecoastnews.org

70

Social

with a URL shortening service such as bit.ly. For example, a 59-character URL
linking to YouTube from our sample was shortened to a 20-character bit.ly URL.
We determined the URLs final destination in the case that the URL was of the
shortened type (e.g. bit.ly). Since it is possible for a shortened URL to refer to
another shortened URL (and so on), we allowed for up to three redirects if
necessary. Each URL was truncated at the first occurrence of a forward slash,
question mark, or colon and the resulting URL list and domain list were processed in order to obtain frequencies for distinct URLs and domains, from
which frequency-sorted tables were generated (see Table 2).

User location of Tweets

The location of Twitter users is an important variable for this study. However, as
the location field is freeform in structure, a user may enter anything from a wellformed location (e.g. Rome, Lazio, IT) to less location-specific data (e.g. The
jungle baby!). Occasionally, user locations also contain coordinate data derived
from a GPS-enabled mobile device or IP address approximation. To accommodate this variance, a raw location was first checked to see if it matched the
form of coordinate data (e.g. 26.252527,106.867631). Coordinate data were
assumed to contain a comma separating latitude from longitude and this was
passed to the Yahoo! PlaceFinder API. Assuming a match was found, the
returned location data was stored in a standardized city, state code, country
code format (e.g. New York, NY, US). Raw location data not fitting the

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above procedure for coordinates were then passed in their entirety to the Yahoo!
PlaceMaker API as it recognizes zip/postal codes, country/state codes, and some
colloquial names, such as The Big Apple and New England. When the API
finds a match, it returns information including the central coordinates of the
matched region (i.e. the center of a town, state, or country). These data were
then used to clean up our data set.

Results
The data represented in Table 3 demonstrate that traditional media was the most
frequently linked media form during the 2010 Pakistan floods. Though 12 websites out of the top 50 and 24 out of the top 100 are social, the representation of
traditional media websites in the hundred most frequently linked to domains was
almost double of social media (with 44/100 domains representing traditional
media). Additionally, the most frequently linked to aggregator sites in the top
100 (i.e. Google News and Pheedcontent) overweighed traditional media
sources over social media sources. Therefore, we found that the representation
of traditional media in the external links is even higher in comparison of social
media when aggregator sites are taken into account.
In Table 4, tweets are broken down by country and link type (based on
domain type). The other category aggregates tweets from 97 unique countries.
Figure 1 suggests geographic difference emerging with a preference to social
media sites in Pakistan. Links pointing to traditional media were posted far
more often across all top link-posting countries, with frequencies usually doubling that of the next closest category (Figure 1). Of note, Pakistan was the
one exception to this trend, where links to social domains were more prevalent
than links to traditional ones. Links to news aggregators were also fairly common
with the exception of the UK, which had a proportionally small frequency of
aggregator links (see Table 4).
Pajek was used to isolate the 100 most important hubs and authorities. As
Figure 2 reveals, we find the authorities within this network have a high frequency
of interconnections with the network as a whole. Each line represents an arc (i.e.
an interaction between users based on an @ mention). Directionality has been
TABLE 3

Top 100 domain frequencies broken down by category.

Category

Number

Median frequency

Mean frequency

SD

Traditional

44

81.5

154.27

186.11

Social

24

69

135.21

132.10

Govt./NGO

19

55

74.68

45.72

Aggregator

11

64

189.18

232.89

TWITTER AND DISASTERS

TABLE 4

Top tweeting countries and breakdown by media category (for the top 100

domains listed by ISO country codes).

Media type

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User country

Aggregator

Govt./NGO

Other

Social

Traditional

Total

885

448

21

969

2,150

4,473

US

362

311

486

1,274

2,440

PK

348

106

60

895

852

2,261

GB

77

197

29

252

822

1,377

IN

94

22

37

228

382

CA

29

35

65

250

381

ID

102

81

105

296

DE

23

22

27

205

277

NL

28

58

16

146

248

AU

24

74

112

FR

24

64

105

IT

76

15

103

AE

45

33

87

SA

16

39

26

82

IR

21

14

40

76

BR

12

54

73

JP

13

31

50

CN

14

20

48

MY

27

45

KR

13

12

13

43

KW

35

39

TH

21

36

ES

12

12

34

removed to make the frequency of links clearer. However, there are both inward
and outward arcs. In concurrence with Kleinberg (1999), our study also found a
low level of intra-hub links. However, the visualization of hubs is similar to that of
authorities (though not included) in that each hub represents a dense fabric of connections back to the network as a whole. The network of Pakistan-related tweets is
cohesive and has clear hubs and authorities. Hubs and authorities were also used to
examine user frequency by country (see Tables 5 and 6)
Table 4 reveals that the United States has the greatest frequency of tweets
(4,473), Pakistan is second (2,440) and the UK marginally behind (2,261). Interestingly, as Table 5 shows, the frequency of tweets from Pakistan itself was the
highest in terms of tweets by authorities despite the United States being the

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

TABLE 5

Frequency of tweets by authority versus non-authority by user country.

User category

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User country

Authority

Non-authority

Total

PK

677

3,205

3,882

GB

145

2,216

2,361

US

70

4,589

4,659

CA

48

839

887

IR

34

96

130

CN

20

68

88

SA

16

115

131

1,010

11,128

Total

TABLE 6

Frequency of tweets by hub versus non-hub by user country.

User category

User Country

Hub

Non-hub

Total

PK

937

2,945

3,882

GB

167

2,194

2,361

CA

52

835

887

CN

52

36

88

AE

45

152

197

IR

42

88

130

US

18

4,641

4,659

SA

11

120

131

IT

171

176

ID

480

483

MY

89

92

AU

202

204

IN

815

816

1,338

12,768

Total

highest in terms of sheer number of tweets. Five of the top 10 hubs as well as
authorities are Pakistan-based Twitter users, making Pakistan the most dominant
country in terms of top-level representation. This is an interesting finding in that
Pakistani Twitter users have a higher chance of hub/authority status.
The top 100 authorities listed one of seven countries for user-defined
location. The tweet frequency by authority versus non-authority from these
countries is shown in Figure 3. A chi-square reveals that the relative portion

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TWITTER AND DISASTERS

FIGURE 3

Tweets (authority/non-authority) by user country.

of tweets sent from authorities in each group varied significantly (x2 794.6, df
4, p , 0.0001). The other category includes all tweets from Ireland, China,
and South Africa. Although users from the United States posted the highest frequency of aggregate tweets, Pakistan had the most tweets sent from 1 of the top
100 authorities and the second-most total aggregate tweets (Figure 3). Though a
significant percentage of tweets from UK users (country code GB) were from
authorities, a chi-square test shows that Pakistans larger percentage of authority-posted tweets is significant relative to the UK (x2 163.9, df 1, p
, 0.0001). These are important findings in that though Western Twitter
users were much greater in total volume (especially when the UK, United
States, and Canada are viewed as a bloc), users from those countries were not
generally viewed as authorities.
We see Pakistan also dominating hubs (see Table 6) with 937 tweets associated with Pakistani hubs. The UKs 167 tweets are significant, but the standard
deviation between the third-highest, Canada, and the next three countries is
marginal. Additionally, the United States has a mere 18 tweets associated with
a hub. The top 100 hubs consisted of 13 user-defined country locations. As
with the authorities country relationship, a chi-square reveals that there is no
consistent percentage of tweets posted by hubs across countries (x2 1465,
df 4, p , 0.0001). The other category aggregates all tweets from IN, ID,
AU, AE, IT, SA, IR, MY, and CN. Like the analysis of authorities, Pakistan
had the greatest frequency of tweets posted by hubs (Figure 4). Pakistans relative
portion of hub-posted tweets was also significantly greater than those of UK
users (x2 293.7, df 1, p , 0.0001). However, the United States had a
marginal level of hub-posted tweets, numbering less than the aggregated

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

FIGURE 4

Tweets (hub/non-hub) by user country.

countries in the other category. The data shows that the United States and
Canada are weak both in terms of authority and hub status.
As Tables 7 and 8 demonstrate, another finding of our study is that though
links to traditional media are clearly dominant, the authorities and hubs of the
network show a preference to social media links over traditional media links
with 319 versus 245 for authorities and 473 versus 346 for hubs. We found
this to be of significant interest as just examining the aggregate number of
tweets only has a limited value in that it is the authority of the tweet that
increases its likelihood of impact on the tweet recipient, thereby raising the question of the impact of social media. Another conclusion, and it is one that is
beyond the scope of this paper, is that the position of Pakistan as leader both
in terms of authority in hubs of flood information potentially reverses historical
trends which position Western media sources as more elite in the role of
disseminating information regarding disasters in underdeveloped countries
(Gaddy & Tanjong 1986).
A chi-square reveals that the percentage of links posted by authorities is
greater within the social category than in the traditional one (x2 160.2,
df 1, p , 0.0001). A chi-square also reveals that the percentage of links
posted by hubs is indeed greater within the social category than in the traditional
one (x2 263.1, df 1, p , 0.0001). Authorities and hubs displayed very
similar linking patterns (Figures 5 and 6). Overall, traditional media links
were clearly most frequent, followed distantly by social media links and then

TWITTER AND DISASTERS

TABLE 7

Breakdown of media type by authority versus non-authority.

User category

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Media type

Authority

Non-authority

Total

Social

319

2,926

3,245

Traditional

245

6,543

6,788

Govt./NGO

74

1,345

1,419

Aggregator

15

2,066

2,081

Other

126

126

Total

653

13,006

TABLE 8

Breakdown of media type by hub versus non-hub.

User category

Media type

Hub

Non-hub

Total

Social

473

2,772

3,245

Traditional

346

6,442

6,788

Govt./NGO

73

1,346

1,419

Aggregator

33

2,048

2,081
126

Other

126

Total

925

12,734

FIGURE 5

The frequency of tweet-embedded links, grouped by link type and partitioned

by authority status.

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

FIGURE 6

The frequency of tweet-embedded links, grouped by link type and partitioned

by hub status.

by aggregator links. Despite this disparity, both authorities and hubs posted more
links to social media domains than any other type, including traditional media.
Authorities and hubs also appeared to link more often to government organizations/NGOs than to aggregator sites even though the total frequency of
aggregator links was greater.

Conclusion
In the case of the 2010 Pakistan floods, tweets more frequently linked to
traditional versus social media sources. However, in the case of tweets from
Pakistani users, the margin between social and traditional is small, but signals
a potential challenge to the elite hold of traditional media (Meraz 2009). A
major finding of this study is that the top 100 hubs and authorities of the
network represented in our sample had a significant preference for choosing
to link to social versus traditional media in their tweets. Though the studys
results showed a continuing preference of total users in the sample to link to traditional media, these findings regarding hubs and authorities were unexpected.
They provide insights into information source preference on Twitter during
disasters.

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TWITTER AND DISASTERS

Additionally, this potentially signals not only an increased legitimization of

social media but also of the legitimization of social media in developing countries
which experience disasters. Another key finding is that though Twitter users
from Western countries (especially the UK, United States, and Canada) constitute a large percentage of total aggregate tweets in our data set, tweets from
Pakistani Twitter users conferred more authority status. In other words, information and links contained in tweets by Pakistani users have a higher likelihood to
be considered more authoritative during the 2010 Pakistan floods. We feel that
these are important findings and ones which warrant further investigation as well
given the lack of substantial literature on authority in disasters on Twitter.
Though [n]one of the celebrated advances in science and technology seem to
have done much to arrest the force of natural disasters (Erikson 1979,
p. 200), social media is one means not only to keep information flow high,
but to also potentially give authority to users sending tweets from disasteraffected underdeveloped countries. Additionally, the preferences in terms of
media sources linked in tweets during the 2010 Pakistan floods highlight a potential trend in the importance of social media-based information during disasters in
developing countries.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Andrew Currier of Bowdoin Colleges Information
Technology Department for programming assistance with the Twitter-based
data collector. Dhiraj Murthy also wishes to acknowledge participants of the
2011 International Communications Association conference (where an earlier
version of this paper was presented) for their useful feedback.

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Dhiraj Murthy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College, USA. His
research interests include social media, virtual organizations, online communities, and digital ethnography. He has recently published his work in Sociology,
Media Culture and Society, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Ethnic
and Racial Studies. He has a forthcoming book with Polity Press titled Twitter:
Social Communication in the Twitter Age. Address: Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Bowdoin College, 7000 College Station, Brunswick, ME 04011,
USA. [email: dmurthy@bowdoin.edu]
Scott A. Longwell recently graduated from Bowdoin College with an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and a minor in Computer Science. He was a
research fellow supervised by Dhiraj Murthy from 2010 2011. Address: Bowdoin
College, Brunswick, ME 04011, USA. [email: slongwel@bowdoin.edu]

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