Abstract
Understanding the propagation characteristics of online emergency news communication is of great importance to guiding emergency management and supporting the dissemination of vital information. However, existing methods are limited to the analysis of the dissemination of online information pertaining to a specific disaster event. To study the quantification of the general spreading patterns and unique dynamic evolution of emergency-related information, we build a systematic, comprehensive evaluation framework and apply it to 81 million reposts from Sina Weibo, Chinese largest online microblogging platform, and perform a comparative analysis with four other types of online information (political, social, techs, and entertainment news). We find that the spreading of emergency news generally exhibits a shorter life cycle, a shorter active period, and fewer fluctuations in the aftermath of the peak than other types of news, while propagation is limited to a few steps from the source. Furthermore, compared with other types of news, fewer users tend to repost the same piece of news multiple times, while user influence (which depends on the number of fans) has the least impact on the number of reposts for news of emergencies. These comparative results provide insights that will be useful in the context of disaster relief, emergency management, and other communication path prediction applications.
Highlights
Understanding the propagation characteristics of online emergency news communication is of great importance to guiding emergency management and supporting the dissemination of vital information
The results for the above three measures indicated that the 15-day median lifecycle of emergency events is the shortest of the five types of events, succeeded by tech news (23 days), entertainment news (29 days), politics (25 days), and social news (30 days). These characteristics illustrate that most emergency news will not be disseminated over a long period of time, as the nature of emergency events means that they last a short period
We investigated the unique patterns of the spread of emergency news based on data obtained from Sina Weibo
Summary
Understanding the propagation characteristics of online emergency news communication is of great importance to guiding emergency management and supporting the dissemination of vital information. Compared with other types of news, fewer users tend to repost the same piece of news multiple times, while user influence (which depends on the number of fans) has the least impact on the number of reposts for news of emergencies. These comparative results provide insights that will be useful in the context of disaster relief, emergency management, and other communication path prediction applications. The development of mobile networks, cloud computing, and big data technology applications, more and more users can get information about emergencies from other individuals and express their opinions to others on the social media platform. The advancement of Internet technology has provided a platform for the public to freely express opinions and has promoted the triggering of public opinion crises
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