The New War Correspondents: the Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare
This research addresses the problem of information dissemination in conflict zones for affected communities, offering insights for designing civic media systems, though it is incremental in building on existing social media studies.
The study analyzed Twitter activity in four Mexican cities during the Drug War, revealing that citizens use social media to share alerts and commentary on violence, with 'civic media curators' emerging as key information aggregators.
In this paper we examine the information sharing practices of people living in cities amid armed conflict. We describe the volume and frequency of microblogging activity on Twitter from four cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War, showing how citizens use social media to alert one another and to comment on the violence that plagues their communities. We then investigate the emergence of civic media "curators," individuals who act as "war correspondents" by aggregating and disseminating information to large numbers of people on social media. We conclude by outlining the implications of our observations for the design of civic media systems in wartime.