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Twitter was blocked in Turkey on February 8, 2023, according to Internet monitoring service NetBlocks. The outage comes amid a massive rescue operation and humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria two days ago.access to twitter appeared to be restored About 12 hours after it was first blocked.
Twitter is a microblogging platform that offers users a way to share short chunks of text, audio, and video, as well as the ability to post threaded conversations. As soon as the main quake struck, thousands of witnesses posted videos and photos on social media, especially Twitter. Such first-hand eyewitness testimony is very helpful for first aid workers and researchers to assess the extent of damage and match assistance with what is needed on the ground.
The Twitter blackout, likely the result of government action, interfered with rescue and relief effortsNetBlocks pointed out that internet service providers block traffic to Twitter, and users can use a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the block.
Officials in many countries routinely block social media and internet access to limit the flow of information. Turkey is one of those countries with a long history of internet censorship.
Twitter’s Role in Disaster Relief
Twitter has been widely used in previous natural disasters. A 2013 US Department of Homeland Security briefing reported that social media played an important role during disasters. Twitter, in particular, is a key source of crowdsourced real-time sighting data that allows relief workers to interact with affected communities.
A recent study looked at all 375 million tweets made on Twitter on a single day (September 21, 2022) and found that the service enables governments to communicate information about crises to citizens and citizens, It turns out that you can ask for help and information. This type of communication and coordination of response efforts has been useful in many situations, from the water pollution crisis in West Virginia to the hurricane evacuation in Florida.
Humanitarian aid and disaster relief require real-time monitoring immediately after a disaster strikes. By combining Twitter feeds with geolocation data and mapping the extracted information, we can visualize the crisis as it unfolds. Responders can track damage, casualties, and resource locations to determine how best to target relief efforts.
This kind of data also helps researchers in fields such as transportation gain insight into the dynamics of evacuation. Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. His time-based analysis of tweets during Sandy’s outbreak found that researchers could use data crowdsourced from his Twitter account to quantify the severity of the hurricane in real time. I was. Such analysis of damage and flood images shared through social media can help emergency managers identify storm damage and plan relief efforts.
Whether it’s a government block, a financial barrier to Twitter’s application programming interface, or a Twitter outage like yesterday’s global glitch, losing access to Twitter will keep you updated on your disaster response as the event unfolds. severely limited. It also hinders our ability to learn from the past and prepare for future emergencies.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. Please read the original article.
