Uncovering sentiment and retweet patterns of disaster-related tweets from a spatiotemporal perspective - A case study of Hurricane Harvey

Social media has been widely used for emergency communication both in disaster-affected areas and unaffected areas. Comparing emotional reaction and information propagation between onsite users and off-site users from a spatiotemporal perspective can help better comprehend collective human behavior during natural disasters. In this study, we investigate sentiment and retweet patterns of disaster-affected areas and disaster-unaffected areas at different stages of Hurricane Harvey. The results show that off-site tweets were more negative than on-site tweets, especially during the disaster. As for retweet patterns, indifferent-neutral and positive tweets spread broader than mixed-neutral and negative tweets. However, negative tweets spread faster than positive tweets, which reveals that social media users were more sensitive to negative information in disaster situations. With the development of the disaster, social media users were more sensitive to on-site positive messages than off-site negative posts. This data-driven study reveals the significant effect of sentiment expression on the publication and re-distribution of disaster-related messages. It generates implications for emergency communication and disaster management.