Posting help-seeking requests on social media has been broadly adopted by victims during natural disasters to look for urgent rescue and supplies. The help-seeking requests need to get sufficient public attention and be promptly routed to the intended target(s) for timely responses. However, the huge volume and diverse types of crisis-related posts on social media might limit help-seeking requests to receive adequate engagement and lead to their overwhelm. To understand this problem, this work proposes a mixed-methods approach to figure out the overwhelm situation of help-seeking requests, and individuals' and online communities' strategies to cope. We focused on the 2021 Henan Floods in China and collected 141,674 help-seeking posts with the keyword "Henan Rainstorm Mutual Aid" on a popular Chinese social media platform Weibo. The findings indicate that help-seeking posts confront critical challenges of both external overwhelm (i.e., an enormous number of non-help-seeking posts with the help-seeking-related keyword distracting public attention) and internal overwhelm (i.e., attention inequality with 5% help-seeking posts receiving more than 95% likes, comments, and shares). We discover linguistic and non-linguistic help-seeking strategies that could help to prevent the overwhelm, such as including contact information, disclosing situational vulnerabilities, using subjective narratives, and structuring help-seeking posts to a normalized syntax. We also illustrate how community members spontaneously work to prevent the overwhelm with their collective wisdom (e.g., norm development through discussion) and collaborative work (e.g., cross-community support). We reflect on how the findings enrich the literature in crisis informatics and raise design implications that facilitate effective help-seeking on social media during natural disasters.
翻译:在自然灾害期间,受害者广泛采纳了在社交媒体上寻求帮助的请求,以寻找紧急救援和用品。寻求帮助的请求需要引起公众的充分关注,并需要迅速传递到预期的及时应对目标。然而,社交媒体上与危机相关的职位数量巨大且种类繁多,可能限制寻求帮助的请求,以获得充分的参与并导致其过度拥挤。为了理解这一问题,这项工作建议采用混合方法,以找出寻求帮助请求以及个人和在线社区应对战略的过度困难状况。我们侧重于中国2021年河南洪水,并在受欢迎的中国社交媒体平台Weibo上收集了141 674个求助搜索站,关键词是“喜南雨暴互助”。调查结果表明,寻求帮助的岗位面临外部过度(即,大量非求助的岗位,与寻求帮助相关的关键词如何转移公众注意力)以及内部过度应对(即防止关注5 % 社区洪水的不平等,以及使用帮助性职位接收超过95 % 的自然联系。通过我们发现这样的工作,通过搜索策略可以反映。