Social Media in Storms: What People Talk About

Have you ever wondered what people talk about on social media during hurricanes? Instead of calling emergency hotlines, many people now turn to platforms like Twitter to share updates and seek help. The problem is, there's so much content that important messages can get lost. In the past, researchers used machine learning to find these relevant posts, but they needed human help to do so. Our study shows that a powerful computer model, called BERTopic, can do this job without any human training.

We looked at 1. 7 million tweets from four big US hurricanes over seven years. The model found that people often talk about disaster relief, their personal concerns, and the weather during these storms. This can be really useful for disaster managers to understand what's on people's minds during hurricanes.

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