Local information sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Mar\'ia

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter data from Hurricane Mare1's aftermath, revealing that local sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans and highlighting the importance of local information in social media communication during disasters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of bilingual Twitter data to identify the prominence of local sources in disaster communication and their influence on information dissemination.

Findings

Spanish tweets focused on hope and helping others

Local sources like journalists and politicians dominated information flow

Content from local sources overshadowed global news and celebrities

Abstract

In September 2017, Hurricane Mar\'ia made landfall across the Caribbean region as a category 4 storm. In the aftermath, many residents of Puerto Rico were without power or clean running water for nearly a year. Using both English and Spanish tweets from September 16 to October 15 2017, we investigate discussion of Mar\'ia both on and off the island, constructing a proxy for the temporal network of communication between victims of the hurricane and others. We use information theoretic tools to compare the lexical divergence of different subgroups within the network. Lastly, we quantify temporal changes in user prominence throughout the event. We find at the global level that Spanish tweets more often contained messages of hope and a focus on those helping. At the local level, we find that information propagating among Puerto Ricans most often originated from sources local to the island, such as journalists and politicians. Critically, content from these accounts overshadows content from celebrities, global news networks, and the like for the large majority of the time period studied. Our findings reveal insight into ways social media campaigns could be deployed to disseminate relief information during similar events in the future.