#CampFireMissing: An Analysis of Tweets About Missing and Found People From California Wildfires

Several research studies have shown the importance of social media data for humanitarian aid. Among others, the issue of missing and lost people during disasters and emergencies is crucial for disaster managers. This work analyzes Twitter data from a recent wildfire event to determine its usefulness for the mitigation of the missing and found people issue. Data analysis performed using various filtering techniques, and trend analysis revealed that Twitter contains important information potentially useful for emergency managers and volunteers to tackle this issue. Many tweets were found containing full names, partial names, location information, and other vital clues which could be useful for finding missing people.

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