Hashtag Standards for Emergencies

This paper aims to inform emergency response agencies about using Twitter during disasters and developing a hashtag system for large-scale emergency monitoring through Twitter.

Hashtags allow researchers, emergency responders and affected community members to easily identify Twitter conversations related to a given topic. Typically, hashtags iteratively form as people join a digital conversation, and they sometimes evolve during an event. This tendency to categorize tweets helps responders identify conversations related to a given event (e.g., #CAR) or identify specific areas of need (e.g., #RescuePH).