Who is empathetic to the disaster you are going through? Mining Emotions (Empathy) in government and nonprofit responders’ tweets.

Abstract

This project establishes and tests a measure of empathy in Twitter posts. The project intends to find evidence on whether community leaders and decision makers are showing compassion for the vulnerable communities undergoing natural disasters like Hurricane Florence through the online media like Twitter. The measure examines accounts from government agencies, nonprofit organizations and elected officials. First, I investigated how government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and elected officials adopted social media as their communication channel with the public. Second, I studied scholarly work on how social media platforms were used during crises, such as natural disasters. Then, I reviewed literature regarding compassion and empathy, and developed the instrument for properly measuring empathy. Finally, I chose Hurricane Florence as my target and content analyzed tweets from selected government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and elected officials. It turned out many contemporary practitioners used Twitter to keep citizens informed under a natural disaster. However, there is limited evidence showing empathy being part of the public-service package regarding Hurricane Florence. The study concludes with future research possibilities on empathy, as part of compassion, and community resilience building for climate and other disasters.