Tech

Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, how Twitter helped find survivors trapped under the rubble

Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, how Twitter helped find survivors trapped under

Hundreds of thousands of messages for help flooded social media platforms after the early morning earthquake that rocked Turkey and Syria on Monday.

"Please send help, we are alive, here is our address," survivors wrote, while other messages were posted on behalf of those still trapped under the rubble.

When the second powerful earthquake hit the same area in the early afternoon, hundreds of Turkish developers, coders and online volunteers were already organized collecting data from social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

"Disaster management should not be so dependent on the private sector, but the shortcomings in crisis management have forced people to do it," said Sedat Kapanoğlu, one of Turkey's best-known coders and a supporter of the Open Software Network. group which now counts over 21,000 volunteers in its ranks.

One of the projects the tech volunteers worked on is afetharita.com (disaster map), which uses artificial intelligence to visualize requests for help posted on social media.

Afetarita.com shared its data so that it could provide search and rescue in the right places.

“We don't know how many lives were saved with this map, as the most it can do is show location information to rescue teams. Therefore, we do not think it is fair to say that we have saved X number of people. Our goal, like everyone else, is to try to help the people who need help out there as much as we can," says Furkan Kılıç, one of the main developers of the Open Software Network.

The Turkish government's decision to temporarily block Twitter on Wednesday due to "disinformation concerns" was met with disbelief among the platform's users.

Calls for help were transferred to Twitter. Therefore, all rescue operations using Twitter were halted as long as the platform was blocked.