Abstract

Message retransmission is a central aspect of information diffusion. In a disaster context, the passing on of official warning messages by members of the public also serves as a behavioral indicator of message salience, suggesting that particular messages are (or are not) perceived by the public to be both noteworthy and valuable enough to share with others. This study provides the first examination of terse message retransmission of official warning messages in response to a domestic terrorist attack, the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. Using messages posted from public officials' Twitter accounts that were active during the period of the Boston Marathon bombing and manhunt, we examine the features of messages that are associated with their retransmission. We focus on message content, style, and structure, as well as the networked relationships of message senders to answer the question: what characteristics of a terse message sent under conditions of imminent threat predict its retransmission among members of the public? We employ a negative binomial model to examine how message characteristics affect message retransmission. We find that, rather than any single effect dominating the process, retransmission of official Tweets during the Boston bombing response was jointly influenced by various message content, style, and sender characteristics. These findings suggest the need for more work that investigates impact of multiple factors on the allocation of attention and on message retransmission during hazard events.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-21-2015

Notes/Citation Information

Published in PLOS One, v. 10, no. 8, article e0134452, p. 1-20.

© 2015 Sutton et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134452

Funding Information

This work was supported by National Science Foundation awards CMMI-1031853 (CTB) and CMMI-1031779 (JS), and IIS-1251267 and by Office of Naval Research award N00014-08-1-1015 (CTB). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Table 1 (PNG). Content analysis coding categories for messages from Boston Marathon Bombing.

journal.pone.0134452.t001.ppt (220 kB)
Table 1 (PPT). Content analysis coding categories for messages from Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Table 1 (TIFF). Content analysis coding categories for messages from Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Table 2 (PNG). GLM negative binomial model using source, style and theme variables predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Table 2 (PPT). GLM negative binomial model using source, style and theme variables predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

journal.pone.0134452.t002.TIF (453 kB)
Table 2 (TIFF). GLM negative binomial model using source, style and theme variables predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Table 3 (PNG). GLM negative binomial fixed effects predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Table 3 (PPT). GLM negative binomial fixed effects predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

journal.pone.0134452.t003.TIF (488 kB)
Table 3 (TIFF). GLM negative binomial fixed effects predicting number of per-tweet retweets during the Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Fig 1 (PNG). Thematic content of official messages is strongly related to expected retweet rates.

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Fig 1 (PPT). Thematic content of official messages is strongly related to expected retweet rates.

journal.pone.0134452.g001.TIF (467 kB)
Fig 1 (TIFF). Thematic content of official messages is strongly related to expected retweet rates.

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