# Information spreading during emergencies and anomalous events

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how information spreads during emergencies using social media and mobile data, comparing different channels and proposing methods to detect anomalous events for better understanding and response.

## Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of information dissemination across communication channels during emergencies and proposes an anomaly detection method for mobile phone data.

## Key findings

- Social media and mobile data reveal different aspects of information flow during crises.
- The proposed anomaly detection method effectively identifies unusual events in mobile datasets.
- Retrospective analysis of real emergencies enhances understanding of social spreading dynamics.

## Abstract

The most critical time for information to spread is in the aftermath of a serious emergency, crisis, or disaster. Individuals affected by such situations can now turn to an array of communication channels, from mobile phone calls and text messages to social media posts, when alerting social ties. These channels drastically improve the speed of information in a time-sensitive event, and provide extant records of human dynamics during and afterward the event. Retrospective analysis of such anomalous events provides researchers with a class of "found experiments" that may be used to better understand social spreading. In this chapter, we study information spreading due to a number of emergency events, including the Boston Marathon Bombing and a plane crash at a western European airport. We also contrast the different information which may be gleaned by social media data compared with mobile phone data and we estimate the rate of anomalous events in a mobile phone dataset using a proposed anomaly detection method.