Investigating the influence of Web-Media in disaster situation by analyzing diffusion of tweets

Abstract

The goal of this research is to prevent unnecessary information diffusion at the time of disaster that can be a cause of confusion among victims. To meet this goal, this paper focused on the possibility of information diffusion being influenced by web media. Following such a situation, this paper examined tweets at the time of Typhoon Hagibis struck Japan in 2019 investigating ratio and temporal changes of tweets containing URLs that transit to news articles sent by web media. Our examination revealed that total numbers of tweets and tweets containing such URLs were positively correlated. Moreover, as a result of referring the source of those URLs, specific Web-Media or news article tended to post.