The Online Search for MH370

FROM MISSING TO MYSTERY THE ONLINE SEARCH FOR MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 370 On March 8th, MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished into the night. The plane's disappearance triggered a sprawling search on land and sea from the steppes of China to the Gulf of Thailand, and a crowdsourced investigation on collaborative sites like Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Tomnod. DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 4 MAR 11 DAY 11 DAY 12 MAR 19 DAY 1 DAY 5 DAY 6 DAY 7 DAY 8 DAY 9 DAY 10 DAY 13 MAR 8 MAR 9 MAR 10 MAR 12 MAR 13 MAR 14 MAR 15 MAR 16 MAR 17 MAR 18 MAR 20 Twitter was the first place many people learned about the flight's disappearance and has remained aflutter with news and speculation ever since. Almost 4 million tweets over the past two weeks have contained "#MH370". INITIAL INGQUIRY TWITTER @ABC: Malaysian Coast Guard tells Y IMH370 1M @ABC no debris has been found as search continues in South China Sea for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The top Tweet containing MH370 was on March 8th from @ABC Malaysian investigators conclude flight may have been hijacked, search expands to Strait of Malacca 60OK 200K As the story of the flight unfolded, Redditors gravitated toward a frequently updated series of daily posts in the /r/news INSPECTION NARRATIVE subreddit. These conversations became an active forum for discussing updates on the search and speculation about the cause of the disappearance. REDDIT A smaller thread is consolidated into the main "Comprehensive timeline" post. 9,460 8,515 7,483 5,822 5,861 4,948 5,025 4,687 988 2,658 1,142 1,249 1,794 comments INTERIM STATUS The English Wikipedia article was first created at 7:37 a.m. on March 8 (Kuala Lumpur local time), less than 8 hours after REPORT the flight disappeared from civilian radar. Since then, the article has grown from just 85 words to more than 4,000 over the course of thousands of edits. WIKIPEDIA 85 words 1,724 2,726 8,146 3,226 3,288 3,959 4,080 4,110 4,349 4,738 4,448 4,881 300K 150K 2.7 MILLION TOTAL PAGE VIEWS 50K AERIAL RECONNAISSANCE Just hours after the flight's • Phnom Penh • Ho Chi Minh disappearance, DigitalGlobe- the digital mapping company behind Tomnod--repositioned TOMNOD Gulf of Thailand MARCH 9 two of their five satellites over 100,000 the Gulf of Thailand region where the plane was last spotted. Users soon began unique visits per hour combing over the satellite FIRST WEEK SECOND WEEK maps the company provided. Strait of Malacca 2.3M 14.000- participants sq.km of satellite maps of the Strait of Malacca added 650,000 tagged objects 6 Kuala Lumpur 24,000 O Last known location 2 Possible radar detection sq.km map viewed 98M times Sources: Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/news I Carmen Fishwick. "Tomnod – the online search party looking for Malaysia Airlines filight MH370." | The Guardian. 14 March 2014 I Topsy I Hashtagify I Wikipedia Page History Statistics I http://stats.grok.se I Tomnod Beutler Ink Investigation conducted by