Twitter Activity Patterns during #qldfloods

Seattle.
The next speaker in our AoIR 2011 panel is Frances Shaw, who focusses our attention on the December/January 2010 Queensland floods crisis; the peak period in southeast Queensland followed 9 January 2010. The floods washed down from Toowoomba through the Lockyer Valley (were a significant number of lives were lost) and into Ipswich and Brisbane. On Twitter, discussion of the floods was coordinated through the #qldfloods hashtag, and the Queensland Police Service Media Unit account @QPSMedia emerged as a leading actor.

Frances worked through the #qldfloods dataset as well as through tweets sent by and directed at the @QPSMedia account, manually coding a subset of these tweets according to a set scheme: informational tweets; media sharing; help and fundraising; direct experience; and reactions and discussion. Over the entire #qldfloods dataset, discussion and reactions, information, and help and fundraising were especially prominent, tweets to and from @QPSMedia focussed especially on information.

During 9-10 January, as the crisis began to unfold, situational and evacuation information from @QPSMedia were especially prominent; on 11 January, focus shifted to advice and mythbusting; on 12 and 13 January, advice changed further towards asking people to stop sightseeing and spreading rumours; on 14 January, patterns shifted more towards law and order directives (against looting and scams). When the overall number of tweets was highest, then, the focus was mainly about information; other forms of information became more prominent as the overall level of Twitter activity declined.

The police’s #Mythbuster tweets were a particularly interesting facet of this activity. Rumours did circulate via Twitter at various times during the event; the police directly engaged with such rumours by instituting its #Mythbuster tweets, hashtagged such in addition to the overall #qldfloods hashtag, and posted corrections and accurate information in this way. This was widely recognised.

Further, the police also received a substantial number of thanks and other expressions of gratitude via Twitter; the police were clearly recognised as an important source of current and accurate information during the event. This also included a certain amount of performance of gratitude, to the police as well as others; to perform such gratitude is an important activity especially at times of crisis.

The way the police managed rumours was an especially important activity, then; the @QPSMedia account helped reassure individual users by showing them that the crisis was being handled by experienced organisations. Expressing gratitude, in turn, allows users to express and share values they also wish to see in others.