Public response to campus shootings using social media

Social media platforms have been widely employed to enhance situational awareness and assist emergency response. A university student prompted a campus lockdown when he shot himself in the hand during a domestic dispute, therefore triggering waves of social media response. This research examines Twitter activities in terms of information sharing and discussion of the incident. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) extracts five topics related to campus environment, incident description and safety concern. By visualizing and analyzing the underlying networks of retweet data, we are capable of observing the process of dissemination. It reveals that information from official organizations reached the most of audience.