Temporal and Multilingual Dynamics of Post-Disaster Social Media Discourse about Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident
This post summarizes the paper “ Exploring Temporal and Multilingual Dynamics of Post-Disaster Social Media Discourse: A Case of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident” by Saiyue Lyu and Zhicong Lu. This paper is published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. You can read the paper here.
Fukushima Disaster on Twitter
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11th 2011 triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami embarked on the subsequent radioactive contamination and radiation exposure to the public. Due to the fear of the long-term contamination caused by the continuing radiation leaked from the plant, numerous people remained evacuated, which led to social traumatic unrest across Japan. Moreover, considering the successive consequent disruptions, including lost lives, contaminated circumstances, and severe potential health risks, people have become more skeptical about nuclear-related policies and the energy future.
One of the major challenges after the disaster is to deal with the radioactive water of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In April 2021, the news that the Japanese Cabinet decided to discharge the stored wastewater into the Pacific Ocean drew global attention once again and sparked a new splash for online discussion among the public. Apart from official channels, this local event also engendered continuing controversy among the public across nations through online social media platforms like Twitter. Panic and confusion about the contaminated marine environment and nuclear energy safety have provoked a heated debate regarding post-disaster management on Twitter.
Social media platforms like Twitter are ubiquitously used to gain information and exchange opinions during and after a crisis. Analyzing crisis-related tweets can help capture insights for public situational awareness development, crisis global response coordination, and post-disaster policy-making. We examined corresponding Twitter discourse in different languages about the nuclear disaster in 2011 and the follow-up discharge of the stored water until 2021. We utilized NLP techniques, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to identify the dominant topics related to the nuclear disaster, the post-disaster discourses, and the public attitudes towards these topics in different time phases.
Engaging Communication, Dominant Themes, and Public Attitudes
We found the top English retweets were always neutral or positive regarding resolving the Fukushima water through the whole ten years based on the scientific calculation of the radioactive levels from IAEA, while top Chinese and Korean retweets were against it, considering global environmental effects and international marine regulations. The Japanese retweets were questioning the post-disaster governmental responses. After the decision to discharge water was announced, the top Japanese tweets appertained more extensively to the debate with Chinese and Korean tweets.
Regarding the dominant themes of the Post-Fukushima-Disaster discussion, the analysis in different languages during different phases indicated the global aspects of this local event. Japanese tweets focused on the treatment of the wastewater, while others conveyed further concerns related to global regulations and potential environmental damage. China and Korea, as neighbour countries, were perturbed more considering the instant potential impacts. We also found that English, Chinese, and Korean tweets expressed stronger opposition than Japanese tweets regarding the official news of water disposal on April 13th 2021.
Overall, public attitudes showed negative signs in all languages due to the complaints about the Japanese government, condemnation of the discharge of the water, and concerns related to marine ecosystem and potential global impacts. Our findings suggest the potential capability of Twitter to gain public attitudes across nations, which helps policy makers to extract the factors that people care about and implement the response to the Fukushima water disposal considering global influences and potential environmental effects.
What to Inform Post-Disaster Policy Making
Based on our findings, we consider a broader discussion on what they can inform post-disaster policy making in the long run.
Effective information transmission, Governments’ transparency, and Global influence
Resuming and maintaining local operations is the major task after the crisis. Unlike official news reports which take much time to formalize, tweets tend to be shortened but neat. It saves much time for the official channels and journalists to update the latest progress after the crisis for the first time. Moreover, to mitigate anger and disappointment and further enhance the trust of the public, governments are supposed to establish better transparency for post-disaster communications, especially for local operation surveillance. Apart from the treatment management, it is also essential to consider the global influence and environmental effects in the long run to foster a reputable international image.
Avoid misinformation across languages
The content on online social media sometimes fails to follow the process to justify the veracity. As a resource-intensive undertaking, information validation could be easier if post-disaster information from official social media channels is more clearly labeled and distinguished, thus limiting the global propagation of misinformation.
Politeness in post-disaster social media
With multiple countries involved, we found the debate on this controversial topic gradually became a flame war, which emerged from the anonymity of online social forums. To avoid flame war to rise to ethnic hatred, which was observed in the crisis communication during COVID-19, government responders should pay more attention to multilingual crisis communication. In addition, it requires due diligence for each user to remain polite when expressing their views instead of stirring up public conflicts among countries. Government agencies can also intensify their awareness-raising efforts with regard to creating a polite civilizational and multicultural circumstance for post-disaster online social communication.
