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To answer these questions, using a unique earthquake sequence that occurred in Southern California (SoCal) in 2019 as a case study, we provide an empirical illustration of people’s cross-platform engagement on two leading OSNs, Twitter and Reddit, a leading microblog platform and a popular news aggregation platform 4. Nevertheless, like Reddit, other platforms can provide diverse insights as users engage with that channel differently than Twitter, particularly during earthquakes, based on our study. While most of these existing studies characterize one single OSN in the context of specific events, our study explores a different perspective: Given the wide variety of OSNs, can the investigations on different platforms reveal a more comprehensive picture of people’s general public responses towards certain disasters? Do people behave similarly on different platforms and can we gain new insights using data collected from multiple online social platforms or channels? Although researchers consider social media as an active fertile ground for contemplation and study, these publications frequently focus on one platform only or are limited to Twitter and Facebook. Previous studies have utilized data collected from OSNs to analyze public responses to extreme events including natural hazards or major social events 1– 3. Meanwhile, although most people use OSNs merely as a way of recording daily life, the potential insight behind the social media data goes far beyond. Online social networks (OSNs) have become an essential component of people’s everyday life and these different platforms serve as important hubs for public expression and interactions. Our analysis also finds that r/conspiracy subreddit is one of the major venues where people discuss the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes on Reddit and different misinformation/conspiracies spread on Twitter and Reddit platforms (e.g., “Big one is coming” on Twitter and “Nuclear test” on Reddit).
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Our study evinces that the users on the two different platforms have both different topics of interest and different sentiments towards the same earthquake, which indicates the necessity of investigating cross-platform OSNs to reveal a more comprehensive picture of people’s general public responses towards certain disasters. Using the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes as our study cases, we collected 510,579 tweets and 45,770 Reddit posts (including 1437 submissions and 44,333 comments) to answer the following research questions: (1) What were the similarities and differences between public responses on Twitter and Reddit? (2) Considering the different mechanisms of Twitter and Reddit, what unique information of public responses can we learn from Reddit as compared with Twitter? By answering these research questions, we aim to bridge the gap of cross-platform public responses research towards natural hazards. Our findings support the Uses and Gratification theory that users on Reddit and Twitter are engaging with platforms that they may feel best reflect their sense of self. In this study, we explore the characteristics of people’s behaviors on different OSNs and conduct a cross-platform analysis of public responses to earthquakes. Most previous research concentrated on a single platform and utilized users’ behaviors on a single platform to study people’s general responses.
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Online social networks (OSNs) have become a powerful tool to study collective human responses to extreme events such as earthquakes.