Throughout Section 3.6, we have discussed a lot about how social media play a very large role in the research of diseases, but that is not the only information social media can provide, especially in real-time. Social media may have become one of the most powerful tools for achieving and maintaining situational awareness. The United States Coast Guard defines situational awareness as “the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about what is happening to the team with regards to the mission. More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you” [36].
This can take the form of disease spreading like influenza, but it also includes many various topics, ranging from eruptions to fires to terrorist attacks. What gives social media an advantage (and disadvantage) on this aspect is the emotional content involved. Since Tweeting or Facebook posts don’t generate revenues for the poster, the individual can report events through their own eyes, without a director or superior deciding appropriate content. As a result, Tweets can give enough information to derive a lot of situational awareness for a human, but automatically finding this information poses many challenges [37].
Regardless, the impact during a disaster scenario is often great. There are many cases where social media have played a huge role, and its impact has been studied widely. We can take a look at how social media responded during hurricane Sandy. In Figure 10, we can see that impact had the greatest amount of Twitter attention, followed by preparedness, while arguably the more important recovery and response channels got a lot less Tweets [38].
Figure 10: Tweet number in different disaster phases over time [38]
It may take a while before analyses of Twitter or other social media data can provide meaningful information for disaster recovery and response teams in real time. Nonetheless, there are significant patterns at work, depending on region and degree of impact [38].