Crisis in a Foreign Language: Emergency Services and Limited English Populations

Social media are increasingly used by emergency responders as part of the communication infrastructure during crisis. As such, it is important to understand how these new technologies offer opportunities and barriers to information access for population affected during crisis events. In particular, this project explores the extent to which Twitter is used to provide emergency-related information to vulnerable populations both during routine and crisis contexts. We look longitudinally, across four years, at the online information and communication behaviors of official emergency responders in the United States. Our results demonstrate a notable lack of crosslanguage crisis communication on social media. We discuss the practical implications of these results, and offer directions for future work and improvement of practices.