Twitter's internal chaos is slowing Turkey earthquake relief efforts, volunteers say
Twitter's Internal Chaos Is Slowing Turkey Earthquake Relief Efforts, Volunteers Sayor the past four days, Hakan Özalp’s Twitter feed has been an endless stream of tragedy. From his home in Amsterdam, the Turkish business professor keeps scrolling through names, phone numbers, and addresses identifying where people are trapped in the debris from athat devastated parts of his home country on Monday, killing at least 20,000 people in southern Turkey and neighboring Syria.
Social media data, especially from Twitter, has long been an invaluable tool in the wake of natural disasters. But this time, according to four data scientists and researchers involved in the rescue effort, the work has been hampered by recent changes to Twitter’s API, the programming interface that enables third parties to access and analyze public data on the platform.
The scale of the devastation and the logistical challenges it presents have emphasized how important Twitter has become in the aftermath of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. “Tweets are used for calling for all kinds of help,” says Sedat Kapanoglu, a former software engineer at Microsoft and co-founder of Turkish social platform Ekşi Sözlük who is working on the effort.
A man puts his ear to the rubble searching for the noise of any trapped person. People ask for more help in the Antakya district of Hatay, one of the cities where the biggest debris was experienced.“People under the rubble called for help by sending tweets. Others retweeted them,” says Kapanoglu. “We have a tremendous amount of data there, and the API is the most reliable and the safest way to access that data continuously.
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