Social capital on social media

Abstract

Social capital is critical during disasters. Many results have shown from various sociological researches that social media are effective tools to share information about victims, rescue attempts, and so on In such cases, we must clarify how social capital appears on social media. In this research, we collected the following personal data from 1500 Twitter users by crowdsourcing questionnaires: personal data, bonding social capital at Twitter, bridging social capita, and its behavioral features. We found that bonding social capital and bridging social capital can be explained by Twitter data. First, bonding social capital can be explained by the rate of replies among all tweets. Second, bridging social capital can be explained by rate of retweets among all tweets. Finally, we analyzed the effect of social capital on social media during disasters using data from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake in Japan. Analysis revealed that when bonding social capital is large, tweets related to disaster information are likely to get replies, and the probability of a reply to tweets related to disasters is higher than a general tweet.