Leveraging social media to mitigate information asymmetry during humanitarian relief operations

This study investigates social media's role in mitigating information asymmetry during humanitarian relief operations (HROs). The 2015 Chennai Flood is used as a case study, and social media analytics (SMA) is utilised to understand how social media can be leveraged to engage people with high social capital for rapid and accurate information diffusion. It uses well-established techniques for SMA, such as topic modelling, sentiment analysis, etc., to gain critical insights from the text corpus obtained from Twitter (now called X). The results show that affected people in a disaster use social media to communicate their concerns/needs to the government or humanitarian organisations (HO) through celebrities and media, which is a unique finding. Moreover, this study shows that organisations serving disaster-affected populations, such as HO and the government, can utilise celebrities not only to get feedback about HROs from the affected people but also to disseminate crucial information, such as alerts, to the affected population at increased speed. Hence, this study recommends that the HO and the government explore utilising the services of celebrities effectively during HROs, as they possess significant social influence.