Social media can be a useful tool for communicating during extreme weather events. Omar Pérez Figueroa, an urban and regional planning professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, examined how Twitter (now X) was used when Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico in 2017.
Social media can be a useful tool for communicating during extreme weather events. Omar Pérez Figueroa, an urban and regional planning professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, examined how Twitter (now X) was used when Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico in 2017.
His findings are published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.
Pérez Figueroa studies how impoverished and marginalized communities address environmental inequalities, water governance, and disaster resilience.
For his research on social media and risk communication, he collected data from Twitter before the platform changed its name, so he continued to refer to it as Twitter for his study. He analyzed a sample of more than 2,000 tweets from before Hurricane María made landfall to six months after the storm to determine «what the event tells us about the reactions and behavior of people, and what is useful to understand to be better prepared.»
Pérez Figueroa analyzed the timing of the tweets and their geographic distribution. Most of them were made prior to landfall, with smaller peaks of activity at later times—for example, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency deleted Puerto Rican disaster statistics from its website.
