Significant change in the contents of tweets before and after the disaster, Twitter usage situation in the Great East Japan Earthquake

ByEspacio CAMON

NEC Big Lobe publishes the result of investigating the use situation of Twitter during the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Twitter is used for safety confirmation and information transmission from immediately after the earthquake to the present, but the data analyzed finely about the actual situation is valuable and the tendency of the information flowing on Twitter changed due to the earthquake from the summation result You can feel it.

Data on Twitter usage status during the Great East Japan Earthquake is as follows.Usage situation of Twitter during the Great East Japan Earthquake | Press Release | NEC Big Lobe

NEC Big Lobe surveyed Twitter usage situation during the Great East Japan Earthquake by using its service "Kanemoto report (Kando Porter)" analyzing tweets on Twitter. The survey period was as many as 73,694,079, the total number of tweets investigated for the whole month from March 11, 2011 to April 11, 2011, and it is the result of summarizing a huge amount of information .

The average number of tweets per day was about 18 million, compared with about 33 million tweets on March 11 on the day of the earthquake, 1.8 times the average. More than 25 million cases continued for 1 week after the disaster, and after that the average number of tweets has exceeded 22 million cases, and the number of cases has increased more than 20% compared with before the earthquake.


Before the earthquake (left pie chart), the topic of entertainment system accounts for about 60%. First of all, it is surprising that about half of entertainment topics are related to animation. It seems to be able to see it as data supporting the high affinity of Twitter and people who often see animation.

However, about one week has passed since March 11, and the disaster-related tweet accounts for 70% to 80%. Its contents are "Damage situation and safety information by earthquake / tsunami", "Restoration activity", "Fukushima nuclear power plant / radiation", "planned blackout", "buying up", "Chief Cabinet Secretariat", "self-restraining mood" Earthquake related disasters such as reconstruction "can also vary widely. Also, many comments such as "Are you OK?" "Safety?" Were estimated, and it was also presumed that there were many cases that were used for safety confirmation instead of the telephone that had become unstable every time after a large aftershock It will be.


"NHK" was the most frequent in the link destination (domain) of the URL included in the tweet. Besides, we saw a situation where we tweeted mainly primary sources of information such as Asahi Shimbun, 47 NEWS of news site, official website of TEPCO, etc.

Also, it is not limited to mass media dissemination information such as "Google Person Finder" which shares information on disaster victims, "evacuation center map" using Google map, relay at USTREAM, expert commentary, etc. It is speculated that the movement to collect various information and propagate useful information while combining it with the report became established.

March 11 - April 10 Linked domain ranking
First place: NHK: Broadcasting station disaster information
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/

2nd place: TEPCO: Planned blackout group PDF
http://www.tepco.co.jp/

3rd place: asahi.com (Asahi Shimbun):
http://www.asahi.com/

4th: Breaking News - 47 NEWS (Yoana News)
http://www.47news.jp/

5th: Google Person Finder (Information on Fate): 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake
http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/

6: USTREAM
http://www.ustream.tv/

7th: Ameba Blog
http://ameblo.jp/

8th: Google Maps
http://maps.google.co.jp/

9th: Livedoor blog
http://blog.livedoor.jp/

10th: Everyday jp (Mainichi Newspaper)
http://mainichi.jp/

The ranking of individual pages linked directly, not by domain, is as follows. The top is a place with high urgency such as safety confirmation and evacuation center information occupied, and other pages summarizing the message of encouragement to reconstruction are ranked in.

Called for power saving, known as "Yashima strategy"Appeared on March 12, the number of tweets including this word reached 15,3928, and the linked URL ranked 10th. In addition to the fact that the consciousness to save electricity has risen at a stroke due to planned blackouts, the real situation is "Neon Genesis EVANGELIONYou can see that it became a big topic because it overlapped with the story of.

March 11 - April 10 URL link URL ranking
First place:Google Person Finder (Birthday Info): 2011 East Japan great earthquake disaster

Second place:Breaking News - 47 NEWS (Hello News)

3rd place:SAVEJAPAN! PROJECT

4th:Evacuation map (nationwide evacuation site list)

5th place:[Prayforjapan.jp] heart-warming tweets posted on the Internet after the earthquake occurred

6th place:Tokyo evacuation area - Google Maps

7th place:East Japan great earthquake (Tohoku district Pacific coast earthquake)

8th place:Disaster Message Board

9th place:【Prayforjapan】 prayers to Japan arrived from the world - NAVER summary

10th place:Yashima strategy - Special agency NERV

Especially immediately after the earthquake, we saw a problem that information was widely disseminated by RT (Twitter retweet) on Twitter, but in order to prevent it, it is possible to delete all the information later if it is incorrect information The use of the official RT was recommended.

The proportion of the official RT has increased sharply from the day of the disaster to March 13 and reached its peak on March 13 when the magnitude of the mainshock was announced as 9.0. I think that it is necessary to consider the truth of the official RT information, but it is presumed that the person who uses the official RT is more often than the one who sent the information regarded as a hoax.


Although the tweet of the earthquake related information occupied a lot after the earthquake, there were also many tweets reacting to it when there was a big event, Tomoyo Miura decided the goal and showed Kazdance March 29th of"Soccer Charity Match"And the TV program of theater version" ONE PIECE "etc. have a great influence on the genre of the tweet content.


Also, the largest number of devices used to use Twitter is a mobile phone, followed by a PC and a smartphone.