Information Cascading in Twitter in Response to Bomb Threat
When people are connected in a network, it is more possible for one person to influence each other’s actions and decisions. Information cascade occurs in the social media context when each individual observe the behaviors and others and follow the actions of preceding individuals. Generally, users of social media like Twitter may be willing to retweet or share the messages because they would like other people to know the importance of the message. Information often originates from the media and then propagates to the rest of the population directly or indirectly through authorities and hubs. Those hubs may be ordinary social media users but they act as a liaison between media and their followers. Twitter is particularly useful in the context of spreading information related to emergency or crisis due to its ability to retweet messages. Information cascading is formed through reposting the contents along with the secondary source or primary source.
In November 7, 2021, cornellians were bombarded with a combination of 22 alerts over Twitter, urging students to avoid the central campus due to bomb threat. To study the information cascade patterns during bomb threat crisis, a model of diffusion of actionable information is used. The basic assumption of this information cascade model is users who retweeted the messages are influenced or believe the information. The graph below displays two instances of information cascades pattern.
The left graph represents information cascades originated from the campus group community and the right graph was from local newspaper. We find most information cascades from local media and certain campus community key users. This model is designed to capture the network dynamics. We can clearly observe that the cascades tend to be wide but not deep: most retweeted messages terminate after it has been shared once.
Graphs depicting retweet activity over the course of the event as new warnings and notifications occur.
According to a similar twitter data analysis gathered from RSI, retweet activity occurs most frequently during the second and third warnings. This graph shows a large component of community users retweeting and propagating information. Interestingly, after the “all clear” message, most messages only occur within two nodes and three nodes group. The larger the component, the more possible that the user may be a reliable source or provides key information to the rest of the population. Moving forward, school authority can gain additional insights through this diffusion process to study the effective ways to facilitate spreading of information in the case of emergency.