Abstract: We explore the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events, taking the case of the terrorist attack in Woolwich, London in 2013 and building models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. Using a random sample of around 600,000 tweets relating to the attack collected over a two-week period, we model a range of social, semantic and cognitive mechanisms that promote information propagation. We show that the presence of multimedia content in posts, audience size, and emotional arousal were significant predictors of information propagation, and that these factors interacted with each other to compound their effect. These findings have implications for emergency service practitioners who seek to communicate with the public during and after terrorist events, and for government agencies that seek to monitor and potentially counter extremist content online.
@article{burnap2014tweeting,
title = {Tweeting the Terror: Modelling the Social Media Reaction to the
{Woolwich} Terrorist Attack},
author = {Burnap, Peter and Williams, Matthew L. and Sloan, Luke and
Rana, Omer and Housley, Will and Edwards, Adam and Knight,
Vincent A. and Procter, Rob and Voss, Alex},
journal = {Social Network Analysis and Mining},
volume = {4},
number = {1},
pages = {206},
year = {2014},
doi = {10.1007/s13278-014-0206-4},
}