Sustainable wildfire management meets social media: How virtual interaction affects wildfire response costs
研究利用Twitter上加州野火官方报告数据，发现社交媒体可见性虽能动员资源，但在高资源使用下反而降低成本效率，形成“可见性-效率悖论”，并提出算法治理策略。
This work addresses the operational conflicts between visibility-driven mobilization and cost efficiency in disaster management scenarios involving wildfires. Using official wildfire reporting on the social media platform Twitter (now X), we develop a temporal gravity model to extract a signal of public attention for California wildfires (2007–2021) without the “noise” of spurious content. Interpreting this signal through the lens of behavioral disaster management operations, our analysis finds a “Visibility-Efficiency Paradox.” This paradox shows that while social media visibility functions as a potent mobilization signal to the general public during wildfires and is associated with greater resource deployment, it simultaneously correlates with reduced cost efficiency under high resource use loads. We identify resource saturation as a boundary condition where heuristic signals appear to shift from valuable inputs to potential stressors. These findings challenge the assumption that high visibility of responders in a wildfire emergency is a direct proxy for operational urgency and effectiveness. We propose actionable strategies, including reverse audits and decoupling, in order to help counteract salience bias; thus, highlighting the potential for algorithmic governance to align public attention with sustainable resource management.