Water Utility Social Media Communication During a Crisis: Is It Equitable?: Fid-Bau Portal

Water Utility Social Media Communication During a Crisis: Is It Equitable?

Obinegbo, Oluchukwu / Osman, Khalid K. / Faust, Kasey / Berglund, Emily / Sadri, Arif

Water systems are one type of critical infrastructure sectors in the United States, deemed sufficiently crucial that an immediate response is required in the event of a crisis. An important aspect of disaster response is effective communication during and after a crisis, and social media has provided means to engage with a diversified audience. However, access to technology is not uniformly distributed, which may reinforce disparities in access to information. To examine the equitability of water utility social media communications during a crisis, we framed our study in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic presented several challenges for water utilities, and informative communication with end-users was notable among the recorded challenges. Although water utilities invest resources in communicating with their users, many lack the resources and knowledge to adjust their communication strategies to reach different communities, making it difficult to effectively communicate important information to diverse communities during a crisis. Our research seeks to determine (1) How effective utilities communication strategies are in ensuring equitable community engagement, and (2) The significance of equitable water utility communications. We utilized the Natural Language Toolkit in Python to analyze approximately 180,000 tweets from 338 utilities across the country over a one-year period. We paired the tweets with county-level COVID-19 hotspot data based on the US Center for Disease Control hotspot classification. Extensions of the Natural Language Toolkit allowed for simple word frequency calculations, n-gram analysis, sentiment analysis, and capturing themes within the text using a latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling approach on a subset of data focused on Texas. The sentiment analysis evaluated if utility communications during this period were positive and objective, and our findings show that tweets were generally positive and neutral. Two of the top 10 themes captured by our topic model were COVID updates communicated in Spanish and information about financial assistance. These themes demonstrate the importance of considering language preference and financial considerations in effective crisis communication. Our study recommends that water utilities prioritize the development of communication strategies that are accessible to all population given the trend of end-users seeking information from social media.