US Gov’t Studying Public Attention To Fukushima, Tracks Twitter Searches – NRC FOIA: ‘Libyan War News Should Now Downgrade Fukushima’

“In 2013, people really interested in radioactive fallout” — US gov’t studying public attention to Fukushima, tracks twitter searches — NRC FOIA: “Libyan war news should now downgrade Fukushima” (ENENews, Dec 10, 2013):

International Business Times, Dec. 11, 2013: In 2013, people were really interested in radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster […] Altmetric factors in both news stories and social media chatter in determining just how popular a scientific paper is. The top-scoring paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports by a pair of Japanese researchers, examined the radioactive cesium contamination of freshwater fish in the areas surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant.

U.S. Department of Energy, Feb. 2013: Section 4 utilizes data from new sources – social media (Twitter) postings and Google search patterns – to trace the changes in public attention to nuclear issues before, during and after the Fukushima event. […] We use these data to focus on the shifts in public attention that occurred with the onset of the crises at the Fukushima nuclear reactors […] What is the magnitude of the effects of these kinds of crises on siting efforts? At the program level, what is the influence of opposition to the siting effort? […] The public may be reacting more strongly to events that are “closer to home.” This finding could have important implications for the lasting impact of the Fukushima event on the American public’s support for nuclear energy […] To demonstrate the utility and flexibility of the real-time measures of public attention, the sections that follow use supply- and demand-based indicators to examine fluctuations in public attention to nuclear issues before and after the T?hoku earthquake […] PUBLIC ATTENTION TO NUCLEAR ISSUES IN THE AFTERMATH OF FUKUSHIMA — Consistent with previous research (e.g., Chew and Eysenbach 2010), we created supply-based measures of public attention by systematically archiving publically available “tweets” (user generated content) on Twitter (https://twitter.com/) that contained one or more phrases (“keywords”) associated with nuclear energy and/or the management of UNF. Specifically, we measured public attention to nuclear energy by collecting and analyzing the set of 1,084,085 publicly posted tweets that contained the words “nuclear energy” and/or “nuclear power” between October 5, 2010 and September 6, 2012. […]

Report to Science Panel (U.S. Congress) by Lake Barrett (Now advising Tepco on Fukushima crisis), March 19, 2011: The Libyan war news should now downgrade Fukushima news wise. For me that is good so I won’t get called as much and I can get my chores around here done.

See also: Leaked emails show British gov’t worked with nuke companies on PR campaign to downplay Fukushima — Degree of collusion “truly shocking”

3 thoughts on “US Gov’t Studying Public Attention To Fukushima, Tracks Twitter Searches – NRC FOIA: ‘Libyan War News Should Now Downgrade Fukushima’”

  1. That’s fantastic. So, will EPA and USDA and FDA expand and publicly report on monitoring food and water and air, so we can have more to talk about to raise those stats?

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.