Digital Traces of Collective Trauma in the 2025 Aceh Climate Disaster
Keywords:
Aceh, sentiment analysis, climate disaster, collective traumaAbstract
Climate-induced disasters generate not only physical destruction but also significant emotional consequences, particularly in communities with a history of traumatic events. This study examines how collective trauma becomes visible in public responses to the 2025 Aceh flash floods and landslides. The objective is to identify emotional patterns expressed on social media and to understand how past disasters shape contemporary reactions. A total of 3,436 tweets posted between 28 November and 9 December 2025 were analyzed using an Indonesian RoBERTa-based sentiment classifier alongside a trauma-informed emotion lexicon. The results show a predominance of negative sentiment, driven largely by expressions related to loss, fear, and anger, while solidarity appeared as the most common positive emotional category. Informational tweets also formed a substantial portion of the discourse, reflecting the urgency and severity of the crisis. The emotional patterns observed suggest the reactivation of collective trauma linked to Aceh’s experience of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, shaping how communities interpret and respond to new climate-related hazards. These findings demonstrate the utility of social media analysis for understanding community-level emotional dynamics and contribute to broader discussions on human security in disaster-prone regions.
References
Abrutyn, S. (2024). The Roots of Social Trauma: Collective, Cultural Pain and Its Consequences. Society and Mental Health, 14(3), 240–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/21568693231213088
Amna, Z., Santy, D. H., Nurhasanah, D., Aristo, N., & Datachi, S. T. (2025). Original Research Article Artikel Penelitian Orisinal Two Decades After Traumatic Events : Prevalence of Mental Health in Aceh Tsunami Survivors [ Dua Dekade Setelah Peristiwa Traumatis : Prevalensi Kesehatan Mental Penyintas Tsunami Aceh ]. 40(2), 1–18.
Asim, M., Mekkodathil, A., Sathian, B., Elayedath, R., N, R. K., Simkhada, P., & Van Teijlingen, E. (2019). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among the Flood Affected Population in Indian Subcontinent. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology, 9(1), 755–758. https://doi.org/10.3126/nje.v9i1.24003
Bastami, F., Mohammadi, R., Piri, Z. A., Valipour, E., Ahmadi, P., Almasian, M., & Nouraei Motlagh, S. (2024). Prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship with coping strategies among flood victims: Evidence from Iran. Journal of Affective Disorders Reports, 15(November 2023), 100704. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadr.2023.100704
Bountress, K. E., Cusack, S. E., Conley, A. H., Aggen, S. H., Vassileva, J., Dick, D. M., Amstadter, A. B., Lilley, E., Gelzinis, R., Morris, A., Bountress, K., Adkins, A. E., Thomas, N., Neale, Z., Pedersen, K., Bannard, T., Cho, S. B., Adkins, A. E., Barr, P., … Webb, B. T. (2021). Unpacking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: identifying structural domains. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1932296
Coffin, T. (2025). Ethical Considerations for the Use of Social Media in the Human Subjects Research Setting. J Med Internet Res, 27, 78183. https://doi.org/10.2196/78183
Drury, F. (2025). Indonesia floods death toll passes 600. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4enlp6kzo
Erikson, K. (1976). Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. Simon & Schuster.
Gilliver, L. (2025). How decades of deforestation turned Asia’s floods into one of the deadliest weather events of 2025 | Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/12/05/how-decades-of-deforestation-turned-asias-floods-into-one-of-the-deadliest-weather-events-
Henríquez, P. A., & Alessandri, F. (2024). Analyzing digital societal interactions and sentiment classification in Twitter (X) during critical events in Chile. Heliyon, 10(12), e32572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e32572
Hirschberger, G. (2018). Collective trauma and the social construction of meaning. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(AUG), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441
Houston, J. B., Hawthorne, J., Perreault, M. F., Park, E. H., Goldstein Hode, M., Halliwell, M. R., Turner Mcgowen, S. E., Davis, R., Vaid, S., Mcelderry, J. A., & Griffith, S. A. (2015). Social media and disasters: A functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research. Disasters, 39(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12092
Koto, F., Rahimi, A., Lau, J. H., & Baldwin, T. (2020). IndoLEM and IndoBERT: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-trained Language Model for Indonesian NLP. COLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, 757–770. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.66
Liu, Y., Ott, M., Goyal, N., Du, J., Joshi, M., Chen, D., Levy, O., Lewis, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Stoyanov, V. (2019). RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach. 1. http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692
Nasri, R. I., Seniwati, T., Ilkafah, & Erfina, E. (2020). Screening of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among flood victims in Indonesia. Enfermeria Clinica, 30, 345–349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enfcli.2019.07.115
Norris, F., & McFarlane, A. (2006). Methods for Disaster Mental Health Research. In Psychiatric Services. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.59.7.815
Nugroho, A. (2025). UGM Expert: Severe Sumatra Flash Floods Driven by Upper Watershed Forest Degradation - Universitas Gadjah Mada. https://ugm.ac.id/en/news/ugm-expert-severe-sumatra-flash-floods-driven-by-upper-watershed-forest-degradation/
Rust, P., Pfeiffer, J., Vulic, I., Ruder, S., & Gurevych, I. (2021). How good is your tokenizer? On the monolingual performance of multilingual language models. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference, 1, 3118–3135. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.243
Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., & Birch, A. (2016). Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016 - Long Papers, 3, 1715–1725. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p16-1162
Sönmez, D., & Hocaoğlu, Ç. (2023). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder After Natural Disasters: A Review. Duzce Medical Journal, 25(2), 103–114. https://doi.org/10.18678/dtfd.1277673
Tunçel, Ö. K. (2023). Earthquake, Collective Trauma, and Consequences. Noropsikiyatri Arsivi, 60(2), 97–98. https://doi.org/10.29399/npa.28494
Wilie, B., Vincentio, K., Winata, G. I., Cahyawijaya, S., Li, X., Lim, Z. Y., Soleman, S., Mahendra, R., Fung, P., Bahar, S., & Purwarianti, A. (2024). IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding. 843–857. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.aacl-main.85
Williams, R., Ntontis, E., Alfadhli, K., Drury, J., & Amlôt, R. (2021). A social model of secondary stressors in relation to disasters, major incidents and conflict: Implications for practice. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 63, 102436. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.IJDRR.2021.102436
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Aurisa Yusima
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
