Kate Starbird

Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information

This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.

Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing

The Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter. As information spread, it was filled with rumors (unsubstantiated information), and many of these rumors contained misinformation. Earlier studies have suggested that crowdsourced information flows can correct misinformation, and our research investigates this proposition. This exploratory research examines three rumors, later demonstrated to be false, that circulated on Twitter in the aftermath of the bombings. Our findings suggest that corrections to the misinformation emerge but are muted compared with the propagation of the misinformation. The similarities and differences we observe in the patterns of the misinformation and corrections contained within the stream over the days that followed the attacks suggest directions for possible research strategies to automatically detect misinformation.

Working and sustaining the virtual "Disaster Desk"

Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal non-profit, considering how its articulation, conduct and products of work together express its identity and purpose, which include aspirations of relating to and changing the larger ecosystem of emergency response. Through excerpts of its communications, we consider how the organization makes changes in order to sustain itself in rapid-response work supported in large part by episodic influxes of volunteers. This case enlightens discussion about technology-supported civic participation, and the means by which dedicated long-term commitment to the civic sphere is mobilized.

Characterizing Online Rumoring Behavior Using Multi-Dimensional Signatures

This study offers an in-depth analysis of four rumors that spread through Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Through qualitative and visual analysis, we describe each rumors origins, changes over time, and relationships between different types of rumoring behavior. We identify several quantitative measures-including temporal progression, domain diversity, lexical diversity and geolocation features-that constitute a multi-dimensional signature for each rumor, and provide evidence supporting the existence of different rumor types. Ultimately these signatures enhance our understanding of how different kinds of rumors propagate online during crisis events. In constructing these signatures, this research demonstrates and documents an emerging method for deeply and recursively integrating qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis of social media trace data.

Social Media, Public Participation, and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

ABSTRACT This research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersants to treat the oil, moved through social media and the surrounding Internet during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Using a collection of tweets captured during the spill, we employ a mixed-method approach including an in-depth qualitative analysis to examine the content of Twitter posts, the connections that Twitter users made with each other, and the links between Twitter content and the surrounding Internet. This article offers a range of findings to help practitioners and others understand how social media is used by a variety of different actors during a slow-moving, long-term, environmental disaster. We enumerate some of the most salient themes in the Twitter data, noting that concerns about health impacts were more likely to be communicated in tweets about dispersant use, than in the larger conversation. We describe the accounts and behaviors of highly retweeted Twitter users, noting how locals helped to shape the network and the conversation. Importantly, our results show the online crowd wanting to participate in and contribute to response efforts, a finding with implications for future oil spill response.

How Information Snowballs: Exploring the Role of Exposure in Online Rumor Propagation

In this paper we highlight three distinct approaches to studying rumor dynamics-volume, exposure, and content production. Expanding upon prior work, which has focused on rumor volume, we argue that considering the size of the exposed population is a vital component of understanding rumoring. Additionally, by combining all three approaches we discover subtle features of rumoring behavior that would have been missed by applying each approach in isolation. Using a case study of rumoring on Twitter during a hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, we apply a mixed-methods framework to explore rumoring and its consequences through these three lenses, focusing on the added dimension of exposure in particular. Our approach demonstrates the importance of considering both rumor content and the people engaging with rumor content to arrive at a more holistic understanding of communication dynamics. These results have implications for emergency responders and official use of social media during crisis management.

Delivering patients to sacré coeur: collective intelligence in digital volunteer communities

This study examines the information-processing activities of digital volunteers and other connected ICT users in the wake of crisis events. Synthesizing findings from several previous research studies of digital volunteerism, this paper offers a new approach for conceptualizing the activities of digital volunteers, shifting from a focus on organizing to a focus on information movement. Using the lens of distributed cognition, this research describes collective intelligence as transformations of information within a system where cognition is distributed socially across individuals as well as through their tools and resources. This paper demonstrates how digital volunteers, through activities such as relaying, amplifying, verifying, and structuring information, function as a collectively intelligent cognitive system in the wake of disaster events.

Connected Through Crisis: Emotional Proximity and the Spread of Misinformation Online

During crises, the ability to access relevant information is extremely important for those affected. Previous research shows that social media have become popular for rapid information exchange between members of the online community after crisis events. This study focuses on the effects of proximity to a crisis on information sharing behaviors. Using constructivist grounded theory to guide our inquiry, we conducted interviews with eleven people who used social media in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Salient themes emerging from this study suggest that both physical and emotional proximity to a crisis influence online information seeking and sharing behaviors. Additionally, speed of information sharing and information access renders social media especially useful during crisis and particularly susceptible to the spread of misinformation. We view the latter as a consequence of the inevitable sensemaking process that occurs as individuals attempt to make sense of incomplete information.

Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd

Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our research examines how professional journalists within a rural community impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves, transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these information-sharing activities: the “human powered mesh network” extends the concept of a mesh network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent collaborations in this context.

Could This Be True?: I Think So! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring

Rumors are regular features of crisis events due to the extreme uncertainty and lack of information that often characterizes these settings. Despite recent research that explores rumoring during crisis events on social media platforms, limited work has focused explicitly on how individuals and groups express uncertainty. Here we develop and apply a flexible typology for types of expressed uncertainty. By applying our framework across six rumors from two crisis events we demonstrate the role of uncertainty in the collective sensemaking process that occurs during crisis events.