Facebook, Twitter Usage Spikes During Hurricane Sandy
By Karla Robinson
November 2, 2012
November 2, 2012
- On an average day, the word “sandy” is mentioned 3,000 times on social media. The Wall Street Journal reports that on Monday, the word was mentioned 4.8 million times across various social media sites as people looked to Twitter, Facebook and other networks to get information on the storm.
- Manhattan resident Naomi Ben-Shahar tracked Hurricane Sandy news on social media after she lost power Monday night. “As the power flickered off in millions of homes around New York and New Jersey, many like Ms. Ben-Shahar had been forced to give up on television and radio and rely almost exclusively on social media, where the storm played out on the tiny screens of mobile devices in a hugely fast-paced alternative narrative of destruction.”
- Citizen journalists took to Instagram to post pictures of the storm’s progression, from people prepping to the hurricane’s aftermath.
- “As the frenzy for information grew with the storm, some disinformation creeped into mainstream outlets,” the Journal reported. “A false rumor claiming that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was three feet under water, found its way onto CNN and the Weather Channel.”
- Also, many online news sites went down as East Coast data centers flooded. Datagram, a center in Lower Manhattan which hosts the Huffington Post, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Mediate and others, went down Monday evening when it was flooded.
- Ben-Shahar says social media presented its own challenges. “I feel so disconnected. I’m trying to read only reliable tweets,” she wrote in a Facebook message, adding that “It was frustrating to feel so stuck with my 5-year-old and read about normal life continuing elsewhere.”
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