No Misunderstandings During Earthquakes: Elaborating and Testing a Standardized Tweet Structure for Automatic Earthquake Detection Information

Social media have proven to be useful resources for spreading verified information during natural disasters. Nevertheless, little attention has hitherto been devoted to the peculiarities of constructing effective tweets (and tweet formats), or to common users' comprehension of tweets conveying scientific information. In this paper, social scientists and seismologists collaborated in order to elaborate and test a standardized tweet structure to be used during earthquakes, expanding on the results of a quali-quantitative research project. The tweet format is specifically designed to launch an innovative information service by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV): tweeting the automatic detection of earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 3. This paper illustrates the steps of the research process that led to elaborating a tweet format that will be used in the next few months by the official Twitter account @INGVterremoti.