TWEAK THE TWEET

Tweak the Tweet (TtT) is an idea for utilizing the Twitter platform as a two-way communication channel for information during emergencies, crises, and disasters. Researchers in the area of crisis informatics have recognized that social media sites are places that people turn to during major events to both inform others and to get information from others. Tweak the Tweet seeks to formalize some of these communications to make the information shared more easily processed and redistributed back to the public.

The idea takes advantage of the public nature of Twitter as well as the availability of tools to filter and collect tweets. It also seeks to allow users to inform the public of disaster-related information within (or in a very similar way to) their normal Twitter communication patterns.

Crisis Reporting Hashtag Syntax

A Tweak the Tweet campaign asks users to format their tweets with specific hashtags that allow computers to do a first round of processing on the information. This processing includes extracting location information, creating incident reports from tweets, and sorting these reports into different types of categories. The processed tweets can then be displayed on public web-pages in a variety of formats that allows users to view aggregate information. Examples include spreadsheets that can be sorted over report type and interactive maps that allow users to see where different types of information has been reported.

Deploying Tweak the Tweet

 Tweak the Tweet has been deployed for more than 40 events between 2010 and 2013, including the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, Hurricane Irene in 2011, wildfires in CO in 2012, and Hurricane Sandy. Currently, I am pursuing strategies for allowing "the crowd" to deploy and maintain TtT instances. At this point, TtT still requires that I deploy the infrastructure for collecting and processing tweets. These deployments also require a lot of crowd work to translate tweets and prevent misinformation from getting into the resources. If you're interested in deploying TtT for an event, contact me, and I will deploy the infrastructure and help you recruit and manage a crowd to power your instance.


TtT Map for Hurricane Sandy - Featuring Gas Stations Reports




© Kate Starbird 2017