Crowdsourcing Social Media for Military Operations

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the demographics associated with social media users as a basis for determining how to interact with a population group to inform military operations such as humanitarian aid and disaster relief (HADR). With social media use increasing across most societal groups, information can be shared in a more representative manner than a decade ago. Also, crowdsourcing activities can be more productive and useful as the percentage of citizens using this technology increases. We discuss a recent experiment using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to investigate social bias factors associated with information transmission. 759 participants shared their social media usage characteristics as a feature of that study, and we explore those data in this paper to consider social media uses for HADR scenarios. We provide demographic characteristics for ten major social media platforms and discuss how tailored crowdsourcing would benefit decision making in traumatic and confusing conditions.