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Sensemaking and Communication Roles in Social Media Crisis Communication

Social media is becoming increasingly important during crisis situations. Affected people are now enabled to provide helpful on-site information, and emergency service organisations can use social media to inform people and communicate with them. This study addresses how different communication roles in social media affect sensemaking during crises situations. To this end, we conducted a study on Twitter during the Brussels attacks of 2016. We collected a sample of 3,223,197 tweets, which included a total of 1,535,943 participants. Our study reveals that, whereas information distribution dominates early crisis stages, attention-keeping gains in importance in subsequent stages. It is decisively depending on the characteristics and retweet behaviour of certain communication roles that information is being consulted by individuals in a situation of either lack of information or information overload.