For millions who lost power but could still access the internet on mobile devices, Twitter served as a critical lifeline throughout the disaster that struck on October 29. At least a few news operations, such as Huffington Post and the aggregator BuzzFeed saw their servers go down and turned to Twitter and other social media to deliver reports.
According to Twitter, people sent more than 20 million tweets about the storm from October 27 through November 1. This was more than twice the usage from the two previous days. In New York, usage peaked on October 29 around 9 pm, according to Twitter’s internal data, the same time that a Con Edison substation exploded in Manhattan’s East Village, knocking out power to much of lower Manhattan.
What were the main thrusts of the posts? What would an individual searching for posts about Sandy have found in the social network?
From the day the storm made landfall on October 29 through Wednesday the 31st, news, information, photos and video made up more than half of all the Twitter conversation, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, using Crimson Hexagon technology. Hurricane Sandy Conversation on Twitter Percent of assertions Date Range: October 29, 2012 – October 31, 2012 PEJ analysis using Crimson Hexagon technology The largest share of this news and information, fully 34% of the Twitter discourse about the storm, involved news organizations providing content, government sources offering information, people sharing their own eyewitness accounts and still more passing along information posted by others. Some of these were tales of courage and helping out neighbors during and after the storm, such as an Indian news organization’s first-hand account from a reporter on the ground in New York.