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Fighting disaster misinformation in Latin America: the #19S Mexican earthquake case study

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Abstract

Social media platforms have been extensively used during natural disasters. However, most prior work has lacked focus on studying their usage during disasters in the Global South, where Internet access and social media usage differs from developing countries. In this paper, we study social media use in the aftermath of the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that hit Mexico on the 19th of September, 2017 (known as the #19S earthquake). We conduct an analysis of how participants utilized social media platforms in the #19S aftermath. Our research extends investigations of crisis informatics by (1) examining how participants used different social media platforms in the aftermath of a natural disaster in a Global South country. (2) Uncovering how individuals developed their own processes to verify news reports using an on-the-ground citizens approach. (3) Revealing how people developed their own mechanisms to deal with outdated information. For this, we surveyed 356 people. Additionally, we analyze one month of activity from Facebook (12,606 posts), Twitter (2,909,109 tweets), Slack (28,782 messages), and GitHub (2602 commits). This work offers a multi-platform view on user behavior to coordinate relief efforts, reduce the spread of misinformation, and deal with obsolete information which seems to have been essential to help in the coordination and efficiency of relief efforts. Finally, based on our findings, we make recommendations for technology design to improve the effectiveness of social media use during crisis response efforts and mitigate the spread of misinformation across social media platforms.

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Notes

  1. https://verificado19s.org/sobre-v19s/

  2. http://slack.codeandomexico.org/

  3. https://www.codeandomexico.org/

  4. #sismoCDMX, #sismoCDMX19Sep17, #FuerzaMexico, #Verificado19S, #ayudaCDMX

  5. https://github.com/CodeandoMexico/terremoto-cdmx

  6. https://www.sismosmexico.org/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Claudia Flores-Saviaga

  2. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico

    Saiph Savage

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  1. Claudia Flores-Saviaga
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  2. Saiph Savage
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Correspondence to Claudia Flores-Saviaga.

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Flores-Saviaga, C., Savage, S. Fighting disaster misinformation in Latin America: the #19S Mexican earthquake case study. Pers Ubiquit Comput 25, 353–373 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01411-5

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