"Trends in bushfire related tweets during the Australian 'Black Summer'" by Kerstin K. Zander, Stephen T. Garnett et al.
Social media is widely used in emergencies, but the nature of the communication is poorly understood. We employed unsupervised topic modelling and sentiment analysis to analyse more than 80,000 Twitter tweets posted by users in Australia over a six-month period before, during and after the severe bushfires in 2019–2020, dubbed the ‘Black Summer’. While tweets about bushfire updates dominated, politics, donations and support, impacts and public opinion were also prominent themes. Social impacts were important in the early phase of the fires (Sept & Oct 2019) with health impacts discus...