Communication of a Natural Disaster. An Earthquake Case in Social Media and Online Newspapers

In history, every media development has contributed to a change in human beings’ perception of reality and in the way we have acted in that reality. Orality, literacy, the printing press, and electricity have done it, and so is digital and social media. Reticularity, horizontalization, distributed and informal learning are some of the keywords of this era. The change in perception of natural disaster management through social media (Twitter) both in real time and in the following months is at the centre of the reflection of the work. To study the opinions of Italians regarding the natural disaster of Central Italy in 2016, the authors scraped Italian language Tweets from the web on the subject of earthquakes. They collected all of the Tweets containing the hashtag “terremoto” for nine months (from August 2016 to May 2017). Data analytics was performed with Twitter of R statistics and has resulted in a large corpus to which the authors have applied multivariate techniques in order to identify the contents and the sentiments behind the shared comments. The results show how social media relations and perception change are complex and articulated and can be one of the ways to improve communication activities for prevention.