Do I care enough? Using a prosocial tendencies measure to understand twitter users sharing behavior for minor public safety incidents

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

Social media has been used to assist victims of crises, especially large-scale disasters. Research describes the importance of the crowd who are the first witnesses to any sort of crime or disaster. Among others, this paper focuses on smaller scale public safety incidents such as suspicious activities, and minor robberies. We investigate whether prosocial tendencies affect Twitter users' decisions to share minor public safety incidents on Twitter. The scale used has six subscales including: public, anonymous, dire, emotional, compliant, and altruism. The data (N=363) was collected through Mechanical Turk using an online anonymous survey. Initial results showed a positive relationship between being prosocial and sharing public safety incidents on Twitter. However, once additional variables related to Twitter use were introduced (number of public safety official accounts followed, news exposure on social media, and tweet/retweet frequency), these variables fully mediated the relationship. Limitations and design implications are discussed.

Identifier

85108150973 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9780998133133]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

ISSN

15301605

First Page

2549

Last Page

2558

Volume

2020-January

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