Social media in conflicts and crises

ABSTRACT

The growing importance of social media in conflicts and crises is accompanied by an ever-increasing research interest in the crisis informatics field in order to identify potential benefits and develop measures against the technology’s abuse. This special issue sets out to give an overview of current research on the use of social media in conflicts and crises. In doing so, it focuses on both good and malicious aspects of social media and includes a variety of papers of conceptual, theoretical and empirical nature. In six sections, the special issue presents an overview of the field, analytical methods, technical challenges, current advancements and the accepted papers before concluding. Specific topics range from cyber deception over information trustworthiness to mining and near-real-time processing of social media data.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• crisis informatics
• emergency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christian Reuter http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1920-038X

Stefan Stieglitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4366-1840

Muhammad Imran http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7882-5502

Additional information

Funding

The work of Christian Reuter has been funded by the German Federal Ministery of Education and Research and the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts within their joint support of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity. This work has also been funded by the DFG within the CRC 1119 CROSSING and CRC 1053 MAKI.