Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief.

摘要

Social media has recently played a critical role in natural disasters as an information propagator that can be leveraged for disaster relief. After the catastrophic Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010, people published numerous texts and photos about their personal experiences during the earthquake via social media sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and blogs, and videos were posted on YouTube. In just 48 hours, the Red Cross received US$8 million in donations directly from texts, which exemplifies one benefit of the powerful propagation capability of social media sites.