@LastQuake: automatic earthquake communications tailored to vulnerable communities, seismologists, the public, and the media.

@LastQuake is the official Twitter channel (200k followers) of the Euro-Med Seismological Centre. When an earthquake strikes, real-time information on the seismic event is automatically published via a Twitter-robot. This robot was developed in 2012 and its automatic tweets range from scientific information about earthquake location and magnitude, to accounts of shaking felt by earthquake eyewitnesses and safety guidelines and tsunami warnings. Although efficient and reliable, over the years the robot has shown margins for improvement:

• after a large magnitude event, the tweets related to the aftershocks overshadow the information about the mainshock – how should the robot cluster and prioritize earthquake information?
  
  
• a non-destructive earthquake currently generates interactions on Twitter for only twenty minutes, while a destructive event attracts the interest of various audiences (i.e., the affected population, the seismologists, the media) for a much longer period of time – how should the robot regulate the duration of information depending upon the earthquake?
  
  
• although used world-wide, @LastQuake is still not well-known in certain countries – how could Twitter be used to reach out to a much greater number of earthquake eyewitnesses and better assess the earthquake effects?

We renewed @LastQuake to better tailor the information to our different audiences and to make the most of the EMSC’s most recently-developed services. In order to cluster information on the same event, our new robot uses the Twitter-thread functionality, where information about the same event is gathered in a series of connected tweets. To regulate the duration of information, we classify earthquakes into five categories depending upon their magnitude, the interest they generate among the public, and their destructiveness potential:

• small magnitude earthquakes with and without public interest;
• larger magnitude earthquakes with and without public interest;
• destructive earthquakes.

Each class has different information displayed, and hence a different length of the thread. To increase awareness of the LastQuake service in a region where we are not well-known, and potentially gather a much greater number of felt reports after an earthquake, the robot is now equipped with an ‘invitation tweet’, a feature that allows, in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, to automatically respond to tweets from potential earthquake eyewitnesses in a specified region and invite them to report their experience in the case of an earthquake. During an earthquake, the affected population process information and act differently than they would do in times of non-crisis: our wording and tone are carefully chosen to provide reliable and empathetic communication, and we improved our illustrations to be accessible to users suffering from color-vision deficiency. To debunk misinformation and fake news, we prepared a series of educational tweets in collaboration with IRIS. The new robot is versatile, targeting not only the affected population, with urgent information, but also the seismologists, with technical information, and the general public and the media, with wrap-up information on what has just happened.

We will present to you the renewed @LastQuake Twitter-bot environment and discuss our strategy for tailoring earthquake crisis communications via Twitter.