Either as a way of reaching the public to promote disaster preparedness measures or searching for timely, accurate and legitimate information in the immediate aftermath of an urgent event or in any other manner concerning risk and crisis communication, social media use gains in importance. In the interim, traditional media still have essential roles, whereas, for many duties, evolving functions of social media tools are increasingly being visible. Emergency organizations, citizens, volunteer groups, governmental organizations employ various social media platforms for different purposes like early warning, crowd-sourcing, monitoring the public, accessing and disseminating information, seeking for the assistance and so forth. In times of crisis, one of the micro-blogging sites is extensively used as a medium for interactive communication. In many recent extraordinary situations, such as earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal, the hurricane in Katrina, terrorist attacks in different European capital cities, individuals and organizations utilized Twitter to facilitate information flow.
Experiencing various types of crises, people in Turkey also have often practiced dynamic use of Twitter during and after a number of incidents in the recent years. From time to time, Twitter users have helped to conduct situational awareness via sharing content from the scene, coordinated with other actors, contributed to identifying suspected attackers, provided geo-tagged information, tried to raise attention on risky environments along with different purposes. These intentions are mostly consistent with the efforts of improving the overall picture. In this study, Twitter data about several incidents recently occurred in Turkey is analyzed. The messages have been obtained through the Streaming and REST APIs(Application Programming Interface) of Twitter. The analysis is based on the literature review on Twitter use in crisis settings and distinct utilization of the micro-blogging platform in the local context. Several topics constitute the study, including rumor and misleading information propagation, the self-correcting performance of the community, the role and behaviors of the emergency organizations and the censorship on social media platforms by the government after controversial circumstances.