This week’s faculty seminar by Pallavi Rachel George, Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, is titled ‘Liked, Not Shared: Social Media Engagement During the 2018 Kerala Floods.’

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a critical space for communication during natural hazards. Despite growing usage, research on the content of such communications is limited, particularly in highly vulnerable emerging economies, such as India. In this study, we take the case of the 2018 Kerala floods and analyze Twitter (‘X’) content to examine how information is processed and disseminated during a once-in-a-century flooding event. We map over 100,000 tweets to four phases of the flooding event, based on precipitation intensity between 1st June 2018 to 31st August 2018. We utilize Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modelling technique, and identify three main themes: collective trauma, rescue-and-relief, and donations. We estimate negative binomial regression models to study user engagement with these themes, conceptualizing ‘retweeting’ as active and ‘favoriting’ (i.e., liking) as passive engagement. The study finds a marked difference between the two engagement behaviors, with rescue-and-relief tweets being actively retweeted during the flood peak (not before or after) and liked during the flood peak and recovery phases. Collective trauma-related tweets are more likely to be liked during the flood peak, but we do not see a corresponding increase in retweets at any point. Donations-related tweets are retweeted during the flood peak, but otherwise neither retweeted nor liked as much as the other themes. Importantly, during the flood onset phase, tweets with thematically undifferentiated content were more likely to be retweeted and favorited, compared to the theme-specific tweets, indicating an evolution from general content to information-specific content as the disaster progressed. Overall, the study points to the distinct and deliberate ways that social media content was consumed and shared during the 2018 Kerala floods, particularly highlighting variations in information processing across different phases of the disaster as it unfolded.

About the Speaker

Pallavi is a visiting faculty at NLS Bangalore and is currently finishing up her doctorate in Management from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Her research interests include climate change and disaster resilience, particularly in urban and coastal regions. Pallavi is a Fulbrighter (2024-25 at MIT, USA). She holds an MPP from the National University of Singapore, and a B.A. (Hons) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College.