Improving Social Media for Disaster Response

During a disaster, unverified information spreads through social media, which makes it difficult to find useful information. For example, in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, false tweets confused people and interfered with the discovery of actionable information. To improve the quality of information in social media, we study the psychology of message forwarding in social media and crowd-based techniques that augment the forwarding behavior of humans. In this talk, I will present some results from our research suggesting that crowdsourcing critical-thinking and credibility evaluation can be effective in minimizing the spread of misinformation and in supporting the discovery of relevant information in social media during disasters.