Public Engagement with Official-Source Content in Crisis

Authoritative online information is especially important in disaster, when social media users are seeking out time- and safety-critical information. In this work we investigate how people engage with the posts by authoritative accounts that fall into five social roles-politicians, government agencies, media, weather experts, and humanitarian organizations. More specifically, we explore whether in their disaster-time sensemaking activities social media users engage with the content from different types of authoritative sources differently, and why. We find that tweets by politicians garner most replies and shares, but not due to prevalence in them of tweet features that facilitate visibility and engagement-hashtags, URLs, and images. We find that while higher popularity of political accounts plays a role in higher engagement, it does not fully explain the differences. Preliminary qualitative analysis suggests that politicized event-related posts by politicians and politicized public response to their even innocuous tweets may affect engagement.