Information control and terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter

Authors:
Onook Oh;Manish Agrawal;H. Raghav Rao
Affiliations:
Management Science and Systems, School of Management, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA 14260-4000;College of Business, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA 33620-7800;Management Science and Systems, School of Management, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA 14260-4000
Venue:
Information Systems Frontiers
Year:
2011

Citing 2
Cited 8

Analyzing terror campaigns on the internet: Technical sophistication, content richness, and Web interactivity

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Determinants of Sourcing During Technology Growth and Maturity: An Empirical Study of e-Commerce Sourcing

Journal of Management Information Systems

Microblogging for distributed surveillance in response to violent crises: ethical considerations

Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Introduction to special issue on terrorism informatics

Information Systems Frontiers
Credibility ranking of tweets during high impact events

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media
Finding and assessing social media information sources in the context of journalism

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Use of microblogging for collective sense-making during violent crises: a study of three campus shootings

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Faking Sandy: characterizing and identifying fake images on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy

Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
Retweeting the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster

Communications of the ACM
Community intelligence and social media services: a rumor theoretic analysis of tweets during social crises

MIS Quarterly

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.02

Visualization

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of situational information as an antecedent of terrorists' opportunistic decision making in the volatile and extreme environment of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We especially focus on how Mumbai terrorists monitored and utilized situational information to mount attacks against civilians. Situational information which was broadcast through live media and Twitter contributed to the terrorists' decision making process and, as a result, increased the effectiveness of hand-held weapons to accomplish their terrorist goal. By utilizing a framework drawn from Situation Awareness (SA) theory, this paper aims to (1) analyze the content of Twitter postings of the Mumbai terror incident, (2) expose the vulnerabilities of Twitter as a participatory emergency reporting system in the terrorism context, and (3), based on the content analysis of Twitter postings, we suggest a conceptual framework for analyzing information control in the context of terrorism.