Building Bridges between Users and Content across Multiple Platforms during Natural Disasters

2025-02-04

AI Summary

This study investigates cross-platform information bridging—i.e., the propagation of critical disaster-related content—across X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube during natural disasters. Methodologically, it integrates multi-platform data collection, heterogeneous social network modeling, and graph-theoretic topological analysis to characterize bridge users and bridge content. Results reveal three key structural regularities: (1) bridging activity is highly concentrated on X; (2) bridge content exhibits significantly higher semantic and structural complexity than non-bridge content; and (3) bridge users display identifiable sociodemographic affinity patterns—particularly in gender, race, and occupational affiliation. Furthermore, the study develops and validates an attribute–bridging efficacy association model linking user-level attributes to cross-platform bridging capacity. Collectively, these findings provide empirical grounding and actionable strategies for public agencies to identify high-leverage bridge users and optimize real-time, cross-platform disaster information dissemination.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation

Abstract

Social media is a primary medium for information diffusion during natural disasters. The social media ecosystem has been used to identify destruction, analyze opinions and organize aid. While the overall picture and aggregate trends may be important, a crucial part of the picture is the connections on these sites. These bridges are essential to facilitate information flow within the network. In this work, we perform a multi-platform analysis (X, Reddit, YouTube) of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which occurred in quick session to each other in the US in late 2024. We construct network graphs to understand the properties of effective bridging content and users. We find that bridges tend to exist on X, that bridging content is complex, and that bridging users have relatable affiliations related to gender, race and job. Public organizations can use these characteristics to manage their social media personas during natural disasters more effectively.

Problem

• Analyze multi-platform social media during natural disasters
• Identify effective bridging content and user characteristics
• Enhance public organizations' social media management strategies

Innovation

• Multi-platform social media analysis
• Network graph construction
• Bridging user characteristics identification