The Crisis of Visual Social Media During Crises

• In Event: Crisis Data/Data in Crisis

Abstract

One of the less studied types of data relevant to crises is visual social media data. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example, can provide researchers with images and video produced and consumed during a crisis. This could potentially boost our knowledge of a crisis significantly. However, a major limitation of visual social media data is our ability to accurately interpret increasing volumes of it. The gold standard has always been human interpretation. But, it is increasingly difficult to keep humans meaningfully in the loop. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the fact that visual social media data is going to be increasingly important in crisis contexts, but we need to critically think about the limitations posed by image and video-oriented recognition algorithms and potential solutions. Though it is easy to cede decision-making to algorithms, this could be a potential crisis within crisis research.

Author

• Dhiraj Murthy, The University of Texas at Austin