Why Tweeting Is Safe
The Huffington Post
It's official: Twitter is lifesaving.
A new study in the journal Science Advances, finds that social media can provide a potential path to safety and security during a crisis. Researchers looking back at Hurricane Sandy of 2012 detail how 52 million geographically pinpointed tweets gathered from before, during and after the hurricane offered data on where the weather event ultimately caused the most damage. Big data was useful for scientists in figuring out that the areas that experienced the most notable spike in Twitter activity were associated with areas where residents filed the most insurance claims and received the most individual assistance from Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Crunching numbers was made exponentially faster and easier by technology.