The Role of Social Media During a Natural Disaster: A Case Study of the 2011 Thai Flood

Recently, social media has become a key platform that allowed people to interact and share information. The use of social media is expanding significantly and can serve a variety of purposes. Over the last few years, users of social media have played an increasing role in the dissemination of emergency and disaster information. In this paper, we conduct a case study exploring how Thai people used social media such as Twitter in response to one of the country's worst disasters in recent history: the 2011 Thai Flood. We combine multiple analysis methods in this study, including content analysis of Twitter messages, trend analysis of different message categories, and influential Twitter users analysis. This study helps us understand the role of social media in time of natural disaster.