No abstract

Social media platforms have proved to be vital sources of information to support disaster response and recovery. A key issue, though, is that social media conversation about disasters tends to tail off after the immediate disaster response phase, potentially limiting the extent to which social media can be relied on to support recovery. This situation motivates the present study of social media usage patterns, including who contributes to social media around disaster recovery, which recovery activities they contribute to, and how well that participation is sustained over time. Utilising Twitter data from the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, we statistically examined the participation of different groups (citizens, emergency agencies, politicians and others) across categories of disaster recovery activity such as donations & financial support or mental health & emotional support, and observed variations over time. The results showed that user groups differed in how much they contributed on Twitter around different recovery activities, and their levels of participation varied with time. Recovery-related topics also varied significantly with time. These findings are valuable because they increase our understanding of which aspects of disaster recovery currently benefit most from social media and which are relatively neglected, indicating where to focus resources and recovery effort.

No abstract

Modern society is becoming increasingly dependent on social media for communication and information access and its role in disaster management cannot be overlooked. #RecoverSouthCoast is a research project that analysed data from Twitter and conducted interviews to understand the ways in which social media supported (or hindered) recovery following the summer bushfires on the south coast of New South Wales in 2019–20. This paper examines #RecoverSouthCoast findings from a Twitter content analysis. The results revealed that Twitter use can support bushfire recovery in diverse ways, including post-disaster reconstruction and infrastructure services, donations and financial support, mental health and emotional support, environmental health, business and economic activities, animal welfare, information support, solidarity and social cohesion and insurance claims. These findings are important because they strengthen evidence to support policy and investment in tools and social media capabilities within organisations involved in disaster response and recovery. Interestingly, some challenges to the effective use of Twitter during the recovery process were also identified. The paper provides recommendations for emergency management practice in Australia.