About
In August 2022, Abdulkadir, a student at the Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University in Turkey, reached out to The Bright Initiative to assist him and his fellow students in developing a language model for their school project using Bright Data’s proxy network. They were trying to perform sentiment analysis using publicly available tweets on Twitter (now known as “X”).
In 2023 when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southern and central Turkey, including Kahramanmaraş – Abdulkadir’s hometown, he realized already had the infrastructure in place to help save people trapped in the rubble. A Discord Channel was created, which included many members from the Tech industry in Turkey in an effort to save as many lives as possible.
Challenge
Once they realized that survivors were trapped under collapsed buildings and people in need were distributing aid calls using Twitter, they started a project called “afet.org” (which translates to disaster/catastrophe in Turkish). The aim was “to locate disaster-related distress messages over social media, and provide life-saving information to accredited organizations.”
Impact
Using the residential proxies, a team of software developers and members of the afet.org effort located posts using the hashtag #deprem (‘earthquake’ in Turkish), photos with alt-text indicating a call for help, and posts with specific Geo-location. The collected data was delivered directly to AFAD, Turkey’s disaster management and international aid institution, and to Ahbap, an NGO, disaster aid organization.
Article: Tech Volunteers Rush to Save Turkey’s Earthquake Survivors
