Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, 430 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jan 31;12(1):1634. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-05359-9.
Online social networks (OSNs) have become a powerful tool to study collective human responses to extreme events such as earthquakes. Most previous research concentrated on a single platform and utilized users' behaviors on a single platform to study people's general responses. In this study, we explore the characteristics of people's behaviors on different OSNs and conduct a cross-platform analysis of public responses to earthquakes. Our findings support the Uses and Gratification theory that users on Reddit and Twitter are engaging with platforms that they may feel best reflect their sense of self. Using the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes as our study cases, we collected 510,579 tweets and 45,770 Reddit posts (including 1437 submissions and 44,333 comments) to answer the following research questions: (1) What were the similarities and differences between public responses on Twitter and Reddit? (2) Considering the different mechanisms of Twitter and Reddit, what unique information of public responses can we learn from Reddit as compared with Twitter? By answering these research questions, we aim to bridge the gap of cross-platform public responses research towards natural hazards. Our study evinces that the users on the two different platforms have both different topics of interest and different sentiments towards the same earthquake, which indicates the necessity of investigating cross-platform OSNs to reveal a more comprehensive picture of people's general public responses towards certain disasters. Our analysis also finds that r/conspiracy subreddit is one of the major venues where people discuss the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes on Reddit and different misinformation/conspiracies spread on Twitter and Reddit platforms (e.g., "Big one is coming" on Twitter and "Nuclear test" on Reddit).
在线社交网络（OSN）已成为研究人类对地震等极端事件的集体反应的有力工具。大多数先前的研究都集中在单一平台上，并利用用户在单一平台上的行为来研究人们的一般反应。在这项研究中，我们探讨了人们在不同 OSN 上的行为特征，并对公众对地震的跨平台反应进行了分析。我们的研究结果支持使用与满足理论，即 Reddit 和 Twitter 的用户正在使用他们可能认为最能反映自我意识的平台。我们以 2019 年里德克里克地震为例，收集了 510579 条推文和 45770 条 Reddit 帖子（包括 1437 条提交和 44333 条评论），以回答以下研究问题：（1）Twitter 和 Reddit 上的公众反应有哪些相似之处和不同之处？（2）考虑到 Twitter 和 Reddit 的不同机制，与 Twitter 相比，我们能从 Reddit 中学到公众反应的哪些独特信息？通过回答这些研究问题，我们旨在弥合自然灾害跨平台公众反应研究的差距。我们的研究表明，两个不同平台上的用户对同一地震既有不同的兴趣主题，也有不同的情绪，这表明有必要调查跨平台 OSN，以更全面地了解人们对某些灾害的普遍公众反应。我们的分析还发现，r/conspiracy 子版块是 Reddit 上人们讨论 2019 年里德克里克地震的主要场所之一，而 Twitter 和 Reddit 平台上也传播了不同的错误信息/阴谋论（例如，Twitter 上的“大震即将来临”和 Reddit 上的“核试验”）。
